Biography
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Born
4 August 1925
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Died
28 July 1999 (aged 73)
Ladislav Novak, born in 1925 in Turnov, was a poet and visual artist. From 1941-1944 he studied at Prague's Charles University. Over the next few years he would meet the leading Czech surrealists, and this was to have a lasting impact on his work. In 1954 he moved to the small Moravian town of Trebic to take up a post teaching Czech language at the local Gymnasium. He was to remain here until his death in 1999.
Though his work can more properly be placed within the vein of surrealism, both orthodox and unorthodox, he was also close to the artists of the New Sensibility of the 1960s and helped to pioneer phonic poetry, recordings of which he made in the 1950s, and visual poetry. With Jiri Kolar and Josef Hirsal he formed the first Czech Group of Experimental Poetry. In the visual arts he developed the techniques of alchemage (chemically treating reproductions of pictures) and froissage (interpreting the creased lines made at random by crumpling paper), which brought him the most recognition. Both methods gave free reign to randomness.
As of 1979 he was prohibited by Czechoslovakia's former communist regime from exhibiting and publishing at home. Throughout Europe, however, he had a number of exhibitions and a general retrospective in the U.S. Though he did not die "unknown and forgotten," his relative seclusion in Trebic certainly had an effect on the attention and recognition he received for his work, especially in Prague. On the other hand, living detached from Prague's artistic circles gave him the mental space and time to concentrate on systematically elaborting his own ideas and remain true to his own specific program. As Novak himself stated: "And tomorrow I return to my exile in Trebic. But where am I at home, really? In Prague? In Venice? Anywhere where I have a table to work on, maybe only a piece of foam for a bed and a blanket, good light, a hot shower, peace and quiet for work, and someone to have an intelligent conversation with once and a while . . . I'm afraid I'm being too demanding."
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