Prague, July 19 (CTK) – Czech art historian and painter Josef Cisarovsky, a signatory of the Charter 77 dissident human rights manifesto, died on Sunday at the age of 90, his son Petr told CTK today.
Cisarovsky was born and raised in the small town of Hostoun. When he was 16 years old, the Nazis razed the nearby village of Lidice to the ground. At the age of 17 he joined the anti-Nazi resistance movement.
After World War Two, Cisarovsky studied art in Russia, wrote about art and painted. When the Soviet army occupied Czechoslovakia to suppress the 1968 Prague Spring reform movement, he and his wife moved from Prague to the countryside and bred sheep to maintain their family. Once he signed Charter 77, he was banned from public life, was monitored by the secret police and not allowed to sell his works of art.
Cisarovsky’s works reflect the disillusion after the Soviet military occupation, Charter 77 and the landscape of his childhood. As an art historian, he focused on the Czech and Russian interwar avant-garde.
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