Le refuge de la poésie : Zdeněk Rykr, illustrateur des recueils de Milada Součková

Abstract

The Refuge of Poetry : Zdenek Rykr’s illustrations of Milada Soucková’s Collections of Poems In 1930 the painter Zdeněk Rykr, a special case in the Czech avant-garde movement of the interwar years, married Milada Součková, a poet, prose writer and literary historian. Rykr became the illustrator of two of her collections of poems Kaladý (1938) and Mluvící pásmo [Talking Zone] (1939). The former, a moving prose poem and a meditation upon the defense of a language when it is under threat, was accompanied by black and white drawings interspersed with pseudo-baroque quotations, in the style of kal (refuse, mud, filth) acknowledged in the title, and which can also be found in the compositions of the time on rural motifs. In contrast, the conception of his next collection of poems is dominated by cosmic purity and clarity, which are developed from abstract forms.