Background
Čapek was born in Hronov, Bohemia (Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia, now the Czechoslovakian Republic) in 1887.
painter Photographer playwright writer
Čapek was born in Hronov, Bohemia (Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia, now the Czechoslovakian Republic) in 1887.
First a painter of the Cubist school, he later developed his own playful primitive style. As a cartoonist, he worked for Lidové Noviny, a newspaper based in Prague. He wrote Poems from a Concentration Camp in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he died in 1945.
His illustrated stories "Povídání o Pejskovi a Kočičce" ("All About Doggie and Pussycat") are considered classics of Czechoslovakian children"s literature.
(Original edition of the play by Josef Capek, with authori...)
Due to his critical attitude towards national socialism and Adolf Hitler, he was arrested after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.