Artus Scheiner – Kulihrasek illustration collection
Kulihrášek, by Artus Scheiner and Marta Voleska, edited by Tomáš Prokůpek / 320-page hardback, 9.75 x 11.25 inches, published by Akropolis in the Czech Republic / text in Czech, with a summary in English, hundreds of illustrations in color
I once featured Scheiner on 50 Watts, so took a chance on importing a handful of copies of this new book. I hadn’t seen any of the illustrations in this book (and there are a ton of them). The whole book feels like a transmission from uncanny valley.
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The series of books about Kulihrášek, published in fourteen volumes between 1926 and 1935, was one of the most popular series for younger schoolchildren. Kulihrášek’s stories, in their form standing on the border between a primer and a comic, offered children a successful combination of lessons and fun adventures. Contemporary educators appreciated the verses of Marta Voleská (1905–1985), but the main charm of the books lay in the drawings of Artus Scheiner (1863–1938), whose work, with roots in the Art Nouveau period, became for a time almost synonymous with the ideal artistic accompaniment of the fairy-tale genre. The book is the very first thorough study of Scheiner’s life and work and at the same time a complete set of all Kulihrášek’s stories. All this is supplemented by Scheiner’s pictorial scripts, examples of correspondence and other materials depicting the origin of the famous series. Published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
