Traktoristky a Jedlíci ptáků

At the end of 1947, a small book was published, taking stock of the controversial reception of the exhibition of national artists of the Soviet Union, which in May of that year introduced Soviet socialist realism to Czechoslovakia for the first time. Zbyněk Sekal, a young student of the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague, also purchased the book. From a school trip to Paris in September 1947, he brought back Jean Dubuffet’s rare lithograph Mangeurs d’oiseaux [Bird Eaters] from 1944. The sheet was created as part of the album Matiere et Mémoire ou Les Lithographies a l’école [Matter and Memory or Lithographers at School] with text by Francis Ponge, and was published by Fernand Mourlot in January 1945. The album has been hailed as a turning point in Jean Dubuffet’s work, both because he was working on it to familiarize himself with the technique of lithography and because of the fundamentally new concept of the figure. Zbyněk Sekal then created a drawing and exceptional painting The Supper – loosely based on Dubuffet, cheerfully and confidently poking fun at Dubuffet’s Bird Eaters. My text will seek to answer the question, how does Sekal’s Czech paraphrase, a promising individual free artistic act, differ from Dubuffet’s program?