Oldřich Palata

* 1943

  • "In the spring of 1969, as a non-partisan employee of the cultural administration in charge of, among other things, the theatres, I was summoned by the chief secretary of the district party committee and told that I was there to convince the amateur theatres that they should perform plays by Soviet authors. I told him that he must understand that it could not be done under the circumstances and that nobody would want to perform it. And he said to me at the time, 'Comrade, we don't need people here to explain how something can't be done, but to arrange what we want.' Well, shortly after that I ended up in the courtyard crew."

  • "I don't want it to look like I'm some kind of dissident, I'm certainly not, but I was glad when we bought the tapestry Tribute to Jan Palach for the museum, which is still in the collections today. Of course, that couldn't be mentioned. I justified the purchase so floridly to the commission at the time (which included the district ideological secretary of the Communist Party of Liberec Region) that they ended up borrowing the tapestry from us for the Museum of the Workers' Movement, where it was compulsory for students of the Evening University of Marxism-Leninism, the People's Militia and other students to attend. I took it as a kind of satisfaction that they were going there to look at the tapestry, which was essentially a tribute to Jan Palach. That's kind of one example. Sometimes we've been able to buy things that the authors wouldn't have been able to sell elsewhere, or if they knew what was on them or why they were made, they wouldn't have been allowed to buy them."

  • "Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová were working on Ještěd to complete the supporting concrete cylinder, which was a basic technical task. And for Libenský and Brychtová it was an artistic task - they had to finish the surface of the concrete cylinder and add a distinctive artistic touch to it with their glass. I remember they had several options, they were working on it from the very beginning when Jiří Hubáček approached them with this request. The variant, which is called Meteorites of Glass, came not only from Stanislav Libensky's drawings, but they even created a model from wooden slats and Plexiglas to see how the structure on the surface of the concrete cylinder would work, as well as the optical lenses that the meteorites actually represent. It's a group of glass lenses, and the light hits them and decays. That's what they focused on and searched for and tried out and researched responsibly before they chose the right option out of all the possible options that they originally came up with."

  • "At the Osaka exhibition in 1971, a world exhibition in Japan, Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová brought the so-called River of Life, which was a glass sculpture 22 metres long. It was based on a kind of reflection not only of human life, but there were even traces of military boots. On their part, it was meant as a symbol of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops into our country. However, by 1971, normalisation had advanced so much that the normalisers were also at this world exhibition. When they saw that the military boots were there, they ordered that either the traces be removed by the next day or the Czech exhibition would not open. It turned out that Stanislav Libenský was rather pragmatic this time and did not want to complicate the situation, so he finally agreed. Jaroslava Brychtová was against it until the last moment."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec , 22.06.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:07:03
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Boys with machine guns came to the battalion. They wanted to shoot their way into Germany

Oldřich Palata in uniform during his university military training at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague, 1963
Oldřich Palata in uniform during his university military training at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague, 1963
zdroj: Oldřich Palata’s personal archive

Oldřich Palata was born on 16 April 1943 in Čáslav. His mother Marie Palata was a saleswoman, and his father Bohuslav Palata worked as a surveyor. At the end of the Second World War, he, his mother, grandmother, and four years older sister were hiding in the underground of their family home. After the war, they moved to Jablonec nad Nisou, where his father got a job as a surveyor. He spent all his holidays with his grandmother and aunt in Čáslav. He successfully graduated from an eleven-year school. During his studies, he and his classmates collectively enrolled in the Czechoslovak Youth Union, but he was expelled from the union for the ostentatious non-payment of fees. He worked manually in an automobile brake shop for a year to improve his class profile and was admitted to college. He decided to study the history of art and aesthetics at Charles University. He spent the year 1968 in Železná Ruda in the Border Guard. After college, he joined the District National Committee in Jablonec nad Nisou as a methodist and later as an inspector of culture. After the political screening in 1971, he worked for a year in the yard crew of the Maják production cooperative. From 1972 until the time of the recording in 2023, he worked at the North Bohemian Museum in Liberec as a curator. While working, he completed a postgraduate degree in historical applied art and museology at Charles University. As a curator, he has prepared a large number of exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad. He had close friendships with many artists. He and his wife raised one son. In 2023, Oldřich Palata lived in Jablonec na Nisou.