Josef Čapek was an innovative and pioneering figure, perhaps best remembered and beloved in his home, the Czech Republic, for illustrating a series of children’s stories. Among other achievements, Čapek was additionally a modern artist, critic, author, journalist, playwright and stage designer. With his brother Karel (1890-1938), he wrote seminal plays including Insect Play and R.U.R. The pair are also known to have coined the word ‘robot,” of which we hear much about in the news these days with the advent of artificial intelligence.

After settling in Paris with Karel in 1910, Capek worked in a Cubist style closed aligned with that of Picasso and Braque, though with added elements of constructivism and expressionism. During this time, he founded, wrote for, and illustrated several art periodicals in Czech. In the later 1920s, he organized an exhibition in Prague which showed works by Picasso and other Modernists.

As the 1930s approached, Čapek’s illustrations in his newspapers grew more pointed, particularly after the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 by the Nazis. His brother, Karel, died the same year. In September 1939, he was arrested by the Gestapo and soon thereafter transferred to the Dachau concentration camp and then to Buchenwald. His name is now on the memorial for the lives lost at the camp and his drawings and writings from the time have been preserved. Given his artistic talents, he was assigned to work in a calligraphic workshop in the camp, where he was made to paint the family trees of SS officers.

In 1942, he was moved to yet another prison, where he miraculously continued to translate poetry in English, Spanish and Norwegian, but also wrote poetry: one long poem dedicated to his brother and several others circulated as manuscripts. Three years later he was moved for the final time to Bergen-Belsen where he succumbed to an outbreak of typhus, weakened from his time under imprisonment.