Theodor Pištěk

Life and career

Theodor Pištěk is the son of two actors, Theodor Pištěk and Marie Ženíšková. He inherited his family's artistic talent and love of automobiles: his great-grandfather František Ženíšek was a painter, and his grandfather Julius Ženíšek worked for the Wright Company and was the founder and owner of the Ford Motor Company's branch in Austria-Hungary; in 1895 Julius Ženíšek became one of the first to own a racing car. The actions of his business partner bankrupted the company, and the family was forced to sell Ženíšek's valuable collection of paintings.

After four years at a grammar school, Theodor Pištěk switched to the School of Applied Arts in Prague (1948–1952), where his fellow students included Aleš Veselý and Milan Ressel. Pištěk learned to drive when he was just 16 years old, and at the age of 18, after passing his driving test, he joined the Automotoklub and started competing in car races. In 1952, he was accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he was studying under Vratislav Nechleba, a prominent portrait painter. At the time of his studies, a number of respected pre-war artists and historians (Miloslav Holý, Vlastimil Rada, Vladimír Sychra, Otakar Španiel, Jan Lauda, Václav Vilém Štech) held professorships at the Academy, and among the students were Jan Koblasa, Karel Nepraš, Bedřich Dlouhý, František Mertl, Jiří Valenta, Milan Ressel, Hugo Demartini, Aleš Veselý and Jaroslav Vožniak. His graduation painting, Boxer, earned him an extension to his studies in the form of an honours year in Antonín Pelc's studio. A mastery of painting was important, but Pištěk and his fellow students and friends were more interested in modern art. They countered the oppressiveness of communist rule with all manner of absurdist extracurricular activities. In 1962, Pištěk and a group called The Šmidras founded an amateur ice hockey club called Palette of the Motherland, whose president he was in 1977–1979.

In 1958, Theodor Pištěk married Věra Filipová, an assistant film director, with whom he had two sons (Jan, born 1961 and Martin, born 1967). In the following year, he designed costumes and sets for František Vláčil's film The White Dove. He had a studio in Břevnov in Prague, next door to Zbyněk Sekal's studio, thanks to whom Pištěk met the art critic Jindřich Chalupecký and exhibited as a guest with the May 57 group in 1964–1968. The two artists remained close friends until Sekal's emigration in 1968; Pištěk subsequently visited him in Vienna, where he met the sculptor Karl Prantl.

Pištěk's first solo exhibition was in 1960 at the Film Club in Prague. In 1964–1968, he was included in exhibitions by the Concretist Club. In 1964, he acquired a new studio from Hugo Demartini in Vinohrady. In the 1960s, he was a racing driver, and he competed on circuits and in the European Cup (1967–1969). In 1967, he worked as a costume designer on František Vláčil's films Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, and was one of the artists who designed the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1972–1973, he was nominated for the Czechoslovak national circuit racing team. Pištěk stopped racing in 1974, but he drew on his experience as a racing driver to co-write with Vláčil the screenplay for a film called Rally. Since 1975, Pištěk has concentrated on painting. He was usually considered a photorealist, but in the Eastern Bloc such paintings almost always had a clandestine symbolism that could be read between the lines.

In 1977, a cycle of paintings by Pištěk received a special mention from the jury at the International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-Mer in France, together with a grant that allowed him to visit artists’ studios. After his success in France, several Czech galleries bought his paintings. In the 1980s, he worked as a costume designer for Miloš Forman, winning an Oscar for Amadeus (1984), for which he was also nominated for a British Academy Film Award. For his work on Forman's next film, Valmont (1989), he was nominated for the same two awards, and he won a César Award from the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma. In the United States, he accepted an invitation to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 1987, he exhibited artworks and costume designs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and the Lincoln Center in New York, as well as Indianapolis and Sydney in Australia. Pištěk's exhibition in Seattle was curated by Meda Mládková and introduced by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In 1990, Theodor Pištěk became the chairman of Václav Havel's Prague Castle's arts council and was commissioned to design new uniforms for the Prague Castle Guard. He initiated the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for young artists, becoming one of its founders (alongside Havel and Jiří Kolář).

In 1996, Pištěk had to vacate his studio, and he moved from Prague to Mukařov, where he had earlier designed and built a house. In 2000, President Václav Havel awarded him a First Grade Medal of Merit, for his achievements in art. In 2004, the Czech Film and Television Academy gave him the Czech Lion Award for Unique Contribution to Czech Film. At the 2013 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, he received a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema. In 2012–2013, he had a major retrospective at the National Gallery in Prague and in 2019/2020 another retrospective in the Brno House of Arts.

Pištěk died on 3 December 2025, at the age of 93.

Work

Paintings, reliefs, installations

Theodor Pištěk mastered classic realistic oil painting while studying under then prominent portrait painter professor Vratislav Nechleba. For his graduation painting, Boxer, his studies were extended to include an honours year. At the end of the 1950s, he worked on portrait painting, but surprisingly his subsequent paintings did not draw on his training at the Academy, instead anticipating a Constructivist element in his art, to which he periodically returned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and after 1990 in his three-dimensional installations. In 1960–1961, he created geometrical relief compositions in plaster as positive and negative diptychs (In and Out, 1960; Reverse, 1961).

In the early 1960s, he was in close contact with Zbyněk Sekal, whose studio was next door. They influenced one another when creating material paintings, and their work was based on similar feelings about life. It was at this time that Pištěk made a series of relief assemblages from automobile components (Synagogue, 1962; Crucifixion, 1963) and Art Informel reliefs from dismantled car radiators (Notes from a Missing Person, 1963; Execution, 1964). He also made his first three-dimensional installation, The Ten Commandments (1964).

As a counterpart to his material relief paintings, Theodor Pištěk painted airy black and white compositions in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer that combined simple geometrical forms with structures he had observed in the organic world. They are also his response to post-surrealist symbolism, something a fellow student from the Academy, Jaroslav Vožniak, was working on at this time. The subjects of these paintings were sometimes light-hearted (How to Play Ball, 1966) and sometimes fraught (How to Escape, 1965; Trap, 1965; Unsuccessful Attempt, 1966).

Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Pištěk's drawings resembled targets with bullet holes, and their composition was accented by the use of monochromatic blocks of colour (August Picture I–III, 1968–1969). His series of drawings in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer continued until the beginning of the 1970s (View Inside, 1970; Half-Life, 1970) and was followed by coloured compositions of geometrical forms (Reflection, 1971) and small-format oil paintings in which the geometrical order of blocks of colour was broken by small irregularities (Fall, 1973; House, 1973). He returned to monochrome paintings in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer in the early 1980s in compositions of artificial architecture (Where I Will Live Next, 1982), which later became three-dimensional labyrinths (City, 1997).

Conceptual installations

Pištěk's conceptual installation of sacred objects in the former riding school in Hluboká nad Vltavou had a dramatic gradation and scope, and within the context of postmodern scepticism it offered an updating of the psychological values of collectively valid myths. On an altar in the foreground, which he titled Homage to Böcklin's “Centaur Watching Fish”, he placed the scoop of an excavator arching over a fish in a glass sphere. At the head of the riding school he installed an altar painting with an illusionistic landscape in the Baroque style, to which he added brightly coloured geometrical forms that quoted the American postmodernist Frank Stella. In front of this painting was a pyramid with a pile of refuse that was titled Reliquary. The side altars, hidden in a labyrinth, depicted the Crucifixion as the hanging chassis of a racing car and the Visitation made of an old petrol pump, with car doors as the angel's wings. According to Jiří Šetlík, Pištěk's subjective interpretation of our sick world unmasks our faith in consumerist idols.

Pištěk's three-dimensional objects for his exhibition at the Prague City Gallery (1999) worked with the contrast between image and sound. Garden was a pavilion made of massive children's building blocks surrounded by a forest of hanging poles protecting the pavilion's privacy, with a soundtrack of whispered conversations too quiet to be heard. Next to Garden was Forest, a glass pyramid filled with fragments of wood and rubbish from fly tipping, together with romantic forest still lifes and a soundtrack of chainsaws and falling trees. Other objects relate to Pištěk's film work and his racing career. At the entrance to his retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery Prague, he installed his labyrinthine City and behind it a large glass box with a pile of film costumes, while in the middle of the exhibition space was a racing car. His conceptual diorama The End of the Forest was an artificial forest made of suspended poles through which visitors could look at a painted landscape covering the entire wall (Trade Fair Palace, National Gallery Prague, 2012). This stepping out of the picture plane into the third dimension is an agenda that Pištěk had earlier described in the introduction to a catalogue as “Neo-Romanticism”.

Costumes and set design

1990 uniforms, banners and insignia for the Prague Castle Guard

Pištěk has worked on 111 films with many Czech and Slovak directors, including Oldřich Lipský, Jiří Menzel, Jiří Krejčík, Juraj Herz; as well as with many others, including Janusz Majewski, Bob Hoskins and Jerzy Skolimowski. Some of his works:

The White Dove (1959)

Markéta Lazarová (1967)

The Valley of the Bees (1968)

Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973)

Amadeus (1984)

Valmont (1989)

The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

Arabela (1979–1981)

Pan Tau (1980)

Návštěvníci (1983)

Frank Herbert's Dune (2000)

Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (2003)

Miss Julie (1972), Divadlo na Zábradlí

The Queen of Spades (1972), Smetanovo divadlo

Don Giovanni (2006), National Theatre

Dracula (1994)

Rusalka (1998)

The Count of Monte Christo (1999)

Collections

National Gallery Prague

Moravian Gallery in Brno

Museum Kampa

Regional galleries in the Czech Republic

Galleria Arturo Schwarz, Milano

Galerie Schüppenhauer, Cologne

Galerie Volkmann, Münster

Private collections home and abroad

Important exhibitions

2012/2013 Theodor Pištěk: Ecce Homo, National Gallery Prague

2019/2020 Theodor Pištěk: Angelus, House of Arts in Brno