East Asian Calligraphy and Czech Art after 1948

My dissertation thesis seeks to explore some specific social aspects of the dialogue between traditional Chinese art and thinking and Czech art scene after the February1948, when the Communist party took power in former Czechoslovakia. I am mainly interested in the problematic of inspiration from traditional Chinese calligraphy and Daoist philosophy on Czech painting, visual poetry and literature in the 1950s and 1960s. I will argue that the appropriation of selected Chinese philosophical and artistic themes helped Czech artists, working under the communist repression, to express their innermost human emotions in relation to home, culture, freedom, and one's artistic and human destiny. The communist regime meant to many artists the end of their official artistic career. Life in seclusion outside the main political and social streams became for some of them an opportunity to display pent-up feelings of affinity with the life stories of the ancient Daoist thinkers. In this context, focus is primarily placed on an analysis of several distinctive visual and literary works by Czech leading artists of the period, especially on the selected works by the visual artists Emil Filla, Jiří Kolář, Vladimír Boudník, Jan Kotík or Zdeněk Sklenář and the novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914 - 1997) and his world famous..