Jan Saudek (b. 13 May 1935 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech art photographer and painter.
Jan Saudek was Jewish and having been born in Prague, he lived through the horrors of deportation during World War II. On returning to Prague he was forced to work in secret, hidden in a cellar, where he developed dreams and fantasies whilst living under a rather grey and pragmatic dictatorship. In the seventies he began to "correct" his black and white prints tinting them with watercolours. In his exclusion this "underground man" created an art of dreams, beautifully sad and light: erotic in the most spirited and interesting way. The works of Saudek, are as fascinating and mysterious as Prague itself and have made him one of the greatest living authors. A pillar of twentieth century photographic history.
The surreal world of Jan Saudek is a room with plaster peeling from the walls, which filters the infinite.
The flesh of the annoyingly imperfect bodies, once exposed to his eye and brush are fashioned in to the unique and extraordinary, which only art can give to the underworld, by touches of melancholy and beauty. For her part Sara Saudek tells of infinite decadence of femininity, that is impossible to contain or restrict with a moralizing interpretive palate.
Son of a bank director and of Jewish origin, Jan Saudek was born in Prague, his family were deported to a concentration camp in Terezin, where several of his brothers died.
After the war he began painting and designing. In 1950 he was employed by a typographer and from 1954 to 1956 he was called up for military service. In 1958 he married Marie, with whom he had two children: Samuel and David. In 1959 Marie gave him his first camera, a Flexaret 6x6.
In 1963, inspired by the works of Ed ward Steichen and the catalogue of his famous New York exhibition entitled “The Family of Man”, he decided to become a professional photographer.
In 1969 he travelled to the USA for the first time, where the curator Hugh Edwards encouraged him to continue his work as a professional photographer and the inauguration of his first personal exhibition was held at the University of Bloomington in Indiana.
He returned to Prague, where he was forced to work in a basement to avoid police checks. His first photographs were printed in black and white or sepia. Towards the middle of the 60s, following encouragement from his clients, he took the decision to tint his black and white prints with watercolours, giving them a life and style that were particularly recognisable.
His main themes are eroticism and the female body, which Saudek fills with religious symbolism and symbols of political corruption and innocence. Often his scenes are dream-like and depict hand-tinted nude or semi-nude figures, set against a backdrop of crumbling plaster walls, which were the walls of his basement studio. Another of Saudek's recurring themes is that of the evolution from child to adult, with Saudek depicting the same subject in an identical pose, after several years to describe the passage of time.
In 1970, Saudeck separated from his wife Marie. His international reputation continued to grow and he participated in many prestigious collaborations and the exhibitions of his works in Anvera, Brussels, Bonn, Losanna, Paris and Chicago. In 1983 the first book of his work was published, World of Jan Saudek, in English, German and French.
In 1984, after years of working in a factory, the communist government granted him a permit to work which enabled him to be free from the weekly constraints of earning a salary and thus being able to dedicate all his effort and time on artistic photography.
Saudek still lives and works in Prague. (mondobizzarrogallery)
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| I Would Like to Carry You in My Arms , 1983 |
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| The Love , 1973 |
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| The Knife , 1987 |
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| Those Days of the Sixties , 1965 |
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| Motherhood , 1986 |
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| The Lovers , 1987 |
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| The Holy Matrimony , 1987 |
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| Zdena , 1962 |
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| Pieta , 1990 |
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| The Flag , 1972 |
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| It Touches My Very Soul , 1985 |
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| The Family , 1966 |
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| First Kiss to a Little Brother , 1982 |
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