Arts | All stories

The story of Faust, the doctor who makes a pact with the devil in his pursuit of knowledge, has captured the imagination of some of the great Czech dramatists. In 1985, Vaclav Havel tackled the legend in his play Temptation, or Pokouseni, as it is known in Czech. Just under a decade later, animator Jan Svankmajer tried his hand at the story, producing a grotesque feature-film called Lekce Faust.

One of the emerging Czech singers-songwriters of the new generation, Xavier Baumaxa is entering the Czech mainstream with his new album Retrofutro. Highly acclaimed by critics and increasingly popular with Czech audiences, Xavier Baumaxa is our guest in this week's Arts.

Summer in Prague means one thing - letni kino, or open-air cinema. The season starts in early June, and goes right on until mid-September. In this period, Prague residents and tourists alike are treated to the gamut of films, from Apocalypto right through to Zodiac.

A large retrospective exhibition of the works by Jan Zrzavy is currently being held at Prague's Waldstein Riding School. Although his work attracts large crowds of Czech art lovers, Zrzavy's reputation does not seem to extend beyond the Czech borders. In this week's Arts, we look at why Jan Zrzavy, one of the country's best-known Modernist painters, has yet to be rediscovered abroad.

Prague has been particularly generous to art enthusiasts this summer, with a number of exhibitions ranging from the Abstract painters František Kupka and Piet Mondrian at Museum Kampa to the Modernist Emil Filla at Prague Castle and contemporary Czech art at the City Gallery. But one of the greatest treats at the moment for Czech art lovers is a large retrospective of works by the great Jan Zrzavy at the Czech Senate.

Over the last ten years, Czech sculptor Cestmir Suska has become something of a hit in the US. His larger-than-life and painstakingly geometrical sculptures have been showered with awards, amongst them a prestigious Pollock-Krasner scholarship. The artist himself has twice been invited to live and work in the States, first in Utica, upstate New York, and then Vermont. Both invitations he happily accepted.

Czech-born Zuzana Brejcha is an Austrian filmmaker whose latest project "Gypsy Tears"( Romane Apsa)was screened at a Prague art cinema this week. The two-hour+ documentary was Brejcha's first outing as a director - after 25 years in editing - and she admits her project had a far greater impact on her life than she ever expected. Gypsy Tears is a complex portrait of several Romany families living in an extremely poor settlement in eastern Slovakia, where living conditions leave much to be desired.

Laco Deczi is one of the most respected trumpet players to have ever come out of former Czechoslovakia, a jazzman who got his start in 1960s Prague playing Be Bop and so-called Hard Bop. Deczi (who has lived in the US since the mid-1980s and is now in his late 60s) still routinely tours the Czech Republic and his homeland Slovakia.

One critic wrote of Marta Topferova that you could be better off not seeing what she looks like - just listening to her husky jazz vocals you might guess she's a 50-something Latin American singer-songwriter. In fact, the "tri-cultural" Marta was born here in the Czech Republic, though she has lived in the United States for most of the last two decades.

For this week's Arts, we visited the 47th Zlín Film Festival, one of the oldest movie festivals in the world that is dedicated to children and young people. This event, which once primarily showcased socialist children's cinema, has become an important festival on the world film calendar after reinventing itself since the Velvet Revolution.