Ema Blazkova (1924-2003) Czechoslovakian, Prague Cityscape Mixed Media on Paper. Depicts the iconic skyline of Prague from the Charles Bridge, a stone arch bridge built in Medieval times to cross the Vltava River. Signed and dated 1990 upper left. Informative label in Czech attached to back. 

Overall Size: 17 x 23 in. 

Sight Size: 10 x 16 in. 

#5136  

Ema Blažková was born on August 31st, 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. During World War II she studied at the State University in Roudnice nad Labem, where she was arrested along with eighty other students for planning the assassination of a Gestapo agent. She survived imprisonment and torture at Terezin, and began drawing during this time to cope with the horrors of the war. She was released after five months and continued her education, graduating in 1945. She then studied drawing at the Czech Technical University under Cyril Bouda, followed by lessons at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design. She took part in her first group exhibitions with the Purkyně Association of Artists in 1947, and over the next ten years she had solo shows in Prague as well as abroad in Greece, Germany, and Russia. In 1951 she married Martin Gasparovič, with whom she had three children. After 1960 she continued to paint regularly but began traveling less and less due to long-term physical and psychological injuries from her time in Terezin, and instead focused on illustrating children’s books and teaching art to grammar school children. In 1972 she was arrested and interrogated by the KGB for supposed anti-Communist symbolism and radical philosophy in her work. This worsened her mental state considerably, and she was transferred from Ruzyně Prison to Bohnice Asylum, where she spent over a year in forced therapy and reeducation sessions. In the late 1970s through 80s she began traveling again as state opinion towards her work shifted positively, showcasing her paintings and drawings in France, Egypt, Vietnam, China, and many Eastern Bloc countries. The death of her husband in 1990, however, was the final straw for her sanity, and she spent the rest of her life in isolation and barely communicative, dying on her birthday in 2003. Since then a new appreciation for her work (and the work of other, often disregarded, female artists behind the Iron Curtain) has emerged, as the books she illustrated have been translated into more languages and her earlier art has begun to appear on the market instead of just in private collections throughout Eastern Europe.