Clara Istlerová

* 1944

  • "At the end of the war, my grandfather, his father [Josef Istler’s], because he was German, they sent him to build a road, as a German, and he died there, and my grandmother only got a paper that he died." – "Suddenly after the end of the war?" – "They just beat him up or wore him out, and because he was an old man already..." – "So, you do not remember him at all?" - "I do not remember him. Only in a photograph." – "Was it direct revenge?" – "He was a fine gentleman, but being German, he had nothing to do with the fascists, but he had the bad luck of being born German. He had a German name." – "What was his full name?" – "Hans von Istler."

  • "My dad lost all of them, because he had a studio nearby, all his paintings, and my grandfather and grandmother lost everything. It was actually good for the fact that as a family we never clung to property because we knew you could lose everything in five minutes. So, we lived with that philosophy and I think it is a pretty good stake because you are not clinging to things and you are able to leave the house and not come back."

  • "After 1968, they went with my mother to Switzerland right after the invasion, where we met because I was in London in August 1968, and then we all met in Switzerland. Where dad said at Christmas 1969 that Switzerland was no more, that we were going back to Bohemia. He missed the pubs and the women. I remember that journey, through the winter landscape as we drove out of Switzerland, through the German-Czech landscape. We had a Fiat 600 car packed with paints, canvases, material my father bought because he managed to sell the paintings he painted there. The customs just looked at us, they did not stop us, they did not care about us, they just shook their heads why we were coming back."

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    Praha, 20.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:57:17
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Work is related to life and life is related to work. It‘s supposed to be connected and cannot be separated

Clara Istlerová in 1950 during calligraphy
Clara Istlerová in 1950 during calligraphy
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Clara Istlerová was born on 11 December 1944 in Prague into a family of eminent surrealistic painter Josef Istler and an artist Gertruda Istlerová. On 14 February 1945 bombing hit the block of flats in Nové Město and the family lost everything. After the war, her grandfather Hans von Istler as a German was taken to build the roads where he soon died. Clara Istlerová followed her father’s footsteps since childhood but instead on fine art she started to do graphic arts and typography. In 1959 she entered the secondary industrial school of graphic arts and continued her studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague in the František Muzika’s studio. She experienced the occupation in August 1968 in the UK, from where she left to join her family in Switzerland, who emigrated in response to the presence of Soviet troops. At Christmas 1969 the family returned to Czechoslovakia. From 1971 she taught for three years at the secondary industrial school of graphic arts and became a member of the graphic and typographic group Typo&. She created the graphic design of several literary editions for the Československý spisovatel and Mladá fronta. She worked on several film posters and after 1989 continued her activity as a graphic designer. In 1996 she became a member of the Typo Design Club. In 2021, Anežka Minaříková‘s book Clara about her personal and professional life was published.