Jan Novotný (17 June 1929 – 23 January 2005) was a

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

glass artist Studio glass is the modern use of glass as an artistic medium to produce sculptures or three-dimensional work of art, artworks in the fine arts. The glass objects created are typically intended to make a sculptural or decorative statement, rathe ...

painter Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

and

art teacher Visual arts education is the area of learning that is based upon the kind of art that one can see, visual arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practic ...

Biography

Novotný was born in

Pustá Polom Pustá Polom () is a municipality and village in Opava District in the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 1,300 inhabitants. Etymology The village was initially named just Polom. The word ''polom'' denotes a forest of bro ...

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

and studied at the secondary glass school in

Kamenický Šenov Kamenický Šenov () is a town in Česká Lípa District in the Liberec Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 3,800 inhabitants. The historic town centre is well preserved and is protected as an Cultural monument (Czech Republic)#Monument zone ...

and from 1952 at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague in the studio of prof. Josef Kaplický. From 1959, he was an art teacher at the Secondary School of Art Glass in

Železný Brod Železný Brod (; ) is a town in Jablonec nad Nisou District in the Liberec Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 6,000 inhabitants. The Trávníky district of the town has well preserved folk architecture and is protected as a Cultural monume ...

. In the late 1950s and during the 1960s, he won several significant awards – Silver Medal at XI.

Triennale The Triennale di Milano is a museum of art and design in the Parco Sempione in Milan, in Lombardy in northern Italy. It is housed in the , built between 1931 and 1933 to designs by Giovanni Muzio and financed by Antonio Bernocchi and his ...

Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...

, Honorary Prize at

Expo 67 The 1967 International and Universal Exposition, commonly known as Expo 67, was a general exhibition from April 28 to October 29, 1967. It was a category one world's fair held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is considered to be one of the most s ...

Montreal Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

. He participated regularly in exhibitions of Czechoslovak glass all over the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, his work was negatively influenced by the adverse attitude of the governing communist regime to his person. The domain of Jan Novotný is

enamelled glass Enamelled glass or painted glass is glass which has been decorated with vitreous enamel (powdered glass, usually mixed with a binder) and then fired to glass fusing, fuse the glasses. It can produce brilliant and long-lasting colours, and be tr ...

–

vase A vase ( or ) is an open container. It can be made from a number of materials, such as ceramics, glass, non- rusting metals, such as aluminium, brass, bronze, or stainless steel. Even wood has been used to make vases, either by using tree specie ...

s, decorative wall plates and

stained glass Stained glass refers to coloured glass as a material or art and architectural works created from it. Although it is traditionally made in flat panels and used as windows, the creations of modern stained glass artists also include three-dimensio ...

windows, but in his work he was using other techniques as well –

etching Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other type ...

drypoint Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio (printmaking), intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate (or "matrix") with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. In principle, the method is practically iden ...

, blowing or

engraving Engraving is the practice of incising a design on a hard, usually flat surface by cutting grooves into it with a Burin (engraving), burin. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or Glass engraving, glass ar ...

. His creations include also classic paintings, graphics and drawings. Most of his life he lived and worked in Malá Skála in northeastern

Bohemia Bohemia ( ; ; ) is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech Republic. In a narrow, geographic sense, it roughly encompasses the territories of present-day Czechia that fall within the Elbe River's drainage basin, but historic ...

References

Literature

External links

Corning Museum of Glass – Jan Novotný

Museum of Glass, Tacoma – Czech Glass, 1945–1980: Design in Age of Adversity
(

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

) {{DEFAULTSORT:Novotny, Jan 1969 births 2005 deaths Czech educators 20th-century Czech painters Czech male painters People from Opava District 20th-century Czech male artists