Adolf Hoffmeister (15 August 1902 – 24 July 1973) was a Czechoslovak writer, publicist, playwright, painter, draughtsman, scenographer, cartoonist, translator, diplomat, lawyer, university professor and traveller.

He exhibited 149 portraits in the Aventine Mansard (catalogue with introduction by Karel Teige, opening Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich) and prepared a series of Czech likenesses for Rozpravy, which was printed on the front page.

He became a member of the anti-fascist Club of Czech-German Theatre Workers, where he became acquainted with a circle of Prague Germans and the composer Hans Krása, for whom he later wrote the libretto of the children's opera Brundibár (1938).

In 1938, his comedy Youth in a Play with music by Hans Krása was staged by the Prague Kleine Bühne Theatre, directed by E.F. Burian, and the same year it was performed in German translation (Anna sagt nein).

On behalf of the International Workers Order (IWO), he lectured at expatriate centers throughout the United States, and then was invited by the U.S. Office of War Information to serve as a broadcaster and editor for the Voice of America.

The Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine printed Hoffmeister's drawings Anti-Axis Algebra, the cartoons of Hitler The Prisoner of Stalingrad, The Leader, and the allegory of the Tehran Conference.

Hoffmeister joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and in November 1945 became head of the VI Department of the Ministry of Information and Education, where he was put in charge of foreign cultural relations.

In the second half of 1950, he spent three months in New York City as a delegate to the Fifth General Assembly of the United Nations and described the proceedings together with Miroslav Galuska in a strongly ideologically oriented report, which he illustrated with cartoons.

He met with Lilya Brik, Leonid Martynov, Ilya Ehrenburg and visited Konstantin Fedin, Chairman of the Russian-German Friendship Union (USSR-GDR), and Boris Pasternak in Peredelkino.

He organized and presented a collection of Western science fiction stories called Labyrint (SNKLU)[9] with his own collages and illustrations by artists such as Jiří Balcar, Mikuláš Medek and Josef Istler.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia did not count on his election at all, as he even figured as the so-called main object in the State Security action called Snob, in which the police tried to compromise some influential artists who seemed to be sympathetic to Western culture.

As early as 1965, he succeeded in reforming the leadership of the SČVU and abolishing the positions of some secretaries controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and decentralizing the management of the exhibition program.

Subsequently, in May 1969, at its last (and officially banned) meeting, the Coordinating Committee of Czech Creative Unions decided to terminate its function due to obstacles preventing normal activity.

[14] Adolf Hoffmeister hosted Graham Greene in Prague in February 1969, visited Max Ernst in Paris in March and attended a PEN Club meeting in London.

"[15] The report of the presidium of the new normalization preparatory committee of the Union for the Constituent Congress of 20 December 1972 states about him that "after January 1968 he intensified his revisionist and increasingly clear anti-party aggressive efforts.

Adolf Hoffmeister was not only a lawyer and politician, but more importantly a cartoonist, illustrator, collage artist, writer, poet, playwright, organizer of foreign exhibitions and art collector.

Devětsil consciously gravitated towards creators outside the currents of contemporary modernism, such as Henri Rousseau and Jan Zrzavý, while the post-war primitivizing idiom was meant to bring about a revival of the original feeling destroyed by civilization.

[25] As a cartoonist, Hoffmeister had a developed sense of the dignity of man, reflecting the democratic traditions in which he grew up and whose roots he absorbed, not the socialist way of life to which he later subscribed, without accepting it wholeheartedly.

[30] This is how, for example, Hoffmeister's portrait of G. K. Chesterton – from a lovable, funny fat man at a desk full of scattered papers transformed to a comic apostle of Catholicism and traveller, depicted as a floating balloon with a cross in the middle of his forehead.

), and also new faces he caught during his travels abroad at UNESCO congresses or conferences (Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Oskar Kokoschka, etc.)

[35] In the early 1930s, influenced by Surrealism, Hoffmeister briefly returned to painting (A Fever Dream, 1931–1932) and participated in the important 1932 Poetry exhibition at the Mánes, where the Paris Surrealist group was also represented.

Hoffmeister continued to uncompromisingly defend freedom and the principles of modern art even in the pre-war left-wing environment, and in 1937 he took part in the Exhibition of the Czechoslovak Avant-Garde in Burian's Theatre D 37.

In American exile, where he created his best cartoons (Tehran Conference, 1943, the series Anti-Axis Algebra, 1943), he had a solo exhibition with Antonín Pelc at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City at the end of the war.

Alongside clippings of old-fashioned xylographic reproductions, tinged with humorous exaggeration and evoking a strange old-world charm, he applied his own drawings, which, through the use of geometric grids, coloured surfaces and spare literary signs, clearly refer to the interwar avant-garde.

The calligraphic qualities of the Abkhazian script, which associated the shapes of the surrounding nature, gave the collages a dynamic movement, and the newspaper clippings with their unintelligible characters became abstract material to create a new concrete reality.

However, the artist respected the certain semantic information of the typeface, and on subsequent trips abroad to Greece, Sicily or the Côte d'Azur, London and Montreal, he always used clippings from local newspapers and magazines.

In the collage Karlovy Vary (1961), where the echoes of Dadaism survive most strongly, the historicist style of spa colonnades is evoked by cut-outs from chessboards, dominoes or card games, set in ornamental frames.

[42] Thematically, these collages are very varied – from dreamlike adventures against the backdrop of the depths of space (The Misfortune of Little Sophie, 1965)[41] and poetic visions (In the Constellation of Fishes, 1963), through parodies of literary genres and sarcastic commentaries on life events (The Prospects of Marriage, 1964) to absurd puzzles with erotic or ironic overtones (New Anatomy, 1965).

Hoffmeister found a connection with the early impulses that gave rise to Union of Modern Culture Devětsil in the antiestheticism of Pop art and its artistic appreciation of banality.

However, Hoffmeister was determined by his romantic generational background and, in contrast to the disinterested and utilitarian relationship of American Pop art to reality, his work, using colour reproductions of contemporary printed matter, is more in the nature of ironic or critical commentary.