Josef Čapek (1887 – 1945), Czech artist. Gained highest esteem as a painter, but was also noted a writer and poet.

Short biography

He was born in Hronov, Bohemia (latter Czechoslovakia) in 1887. First a painter of the Cubist school, he later developed his own playful primitive style. He collaborated with his brother Karel on a number of plays and short stories, on his own he wrote the utopian play Land of Many Names and several novels, as well as critical essays in which he argued for the art of the unconscious, of children and of 'savages'. He was named by his brother Karel as the true inventor of the term robot. As a cartoonist, he worked for Lidové Noviny, a newspaper based in Prague. Due to his critical attitude towards Nazism and Adolf Hitler, he was arrested after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. He wrote Poems from a Concentration Camp in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where he died in 1945.

Selection of his literary works

• Lelio, 1917
• Stin kapradiny, 1930, novel
• Basne z koncentracniho tabora (Poems from Concentration Camp), published posthumously 1946
• Kulhavy poutnik, essays, 1936
• Land of Many Names
• Poems from a Concentration Camp
• Adam Stvoritel (Adam the Creator) - with Karel Capek
• Dasenjka, or the life of a young dog (Dášeňka) - with Karel Capek, illustrated by Josef