Jan Fiala

* 1952

  • "He gave me the task because I was living near Masaryk train station. The rail workers wanted a big portrait of Lenin to hang it there. He ordered me to paint it. So I painted it. It was huge, two by three meters, a huge head of Lenin. But I painted his hair. To round out the head, I stretched his hair all the way down. The rail workers hung it up. My friends, a whole Prague of long-haired guys, used to come to see the Lenin. I was a star, what a great guy I was for making a great job like that."

  • "1969 was an important year, the anniversary of August [occupation]. A lot of my classmates had some problems. Míla Hubeňák, now an architect, a great guy, was arrested. There was a trial with him, the headmaster of our school went to the court and said that it was some mistake, that he must have just gotten mixed up somewhere, that he just happened to walk by, that he was his best student - even though he was making it up. He saved him. He only spent six months in custody, poor guy."

  • "There were some girls and a couple of artists. I was given the task of making huge banners on cloth, which were then on the Letná stands at the Sparta [stadium], so these were made by my hand. Then there was another group of girls who made a second banner similar to that, more cheerful. I was a classical graphic designer, so I did the lettering as best as I could. While the girls made it so playful, with all the little faces too, the letters were so disordered."

  • "When I was studying the faculty of education in Hradec [Králové], apart from being unhappy there, I tried to be there as little as possible, I worked with, I also made pictures for the Jazz Bulletin. That was a magazine that was published by the Jazz Section. I made a lot of pictures, I made record covers, a poster for Martin Kratochvíl's Jazz Q band and things like that. I was also involved a little bit outside, so I tried to keep the inner freedom."

  • "I was friends with a beginning band called The Plastic People of the Universe when I was at secondary school back in those days. But they weren't the famous group yet. The guys who stayed from the earlier days were just Míla Hlavsa and maybe Števich, those two continued. So I made posters for them, used to hang them all over Prague. I'm quite glad that their name came to light, that I had a small part in making them known in Prague. But that was when they were still not an underground, but a psychedelic [band]."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Kolín, 21.11.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 01:09:53
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Kolín, 21.11.2019

    (audio)
    délka: 00:20
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 3

    Praha, 20.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:55:59
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I wanted to keep my inner freedom, but the pressure from the outside was really uncomfortable

Jan Fiala, 1970´s
Jan Fiala, 1970´s
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Jan Fiala was born on 28 March 1952 in Prague, his family roots were in Uhlířské Janovice. While one of his grandfathers served in the Czechoslovak legions in Russia during the war, the other grandfather was already a convinced communist during the years of the First Republic. Jan Fiala graduated from a secondary school of arts and crafts and then went on to study at the Faculty of Education in Hradec Králové. While he remembers the secondary school as a place where relaxed conditions reigned in the spirit of the late 1960s, at the faculty he already experienced the atmosphere of rigid normalisation. During his studies, he made posters for the band The Plastic People of the Universe, and later participated in the creation of the Jazz Bulletin published by the Jazz Section. After completing his compulsory military service, he worked as a graphic designer at the Merkur advertising agency. During the Velvet Revolution, he created posters and banners for the Civic Forum (OF). In the 1990s, he started creating logos for newly emerging companies.