The actions of his business partner bankrupted the company, and the family was forced to sell František Ženíšek's valuable collection of paintings.

At the time of his studies, a number of respected pre-war artists and historians (Miloslav Holý, Vlastimil Rada, Vladimír Sychra, Otakar Španiel, Jan Lauda, Václav Vilém Štech) held professorships at the Academy, and among the students were Jan Koblasa, Karel Nepraš, Bedřich Dlouhý, František Mertl, Jiří Valenta, Milan Ressel, Hugo Demartini, Aleš Veselý and Jaroslav Vožniak.

The two artists remained close friends until Sekal emigration in 1968; Pištěk subsequently visited him in Vienna, where he met the sculptor Karl Prantl.

[4] In the 1980s he worked as a costume designer for Miloš Forman, winning an Oscar for Amadeus (1984), for which he was also nominated for a British Academy Film Award.

In 1987 he exhibited artworks and costume designs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and the Lincoln Center in New York, as well as Indianapolis and Sydney in Australia.

At the 2013 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival he received a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema.

[8] Theodor Pištěk mastered classic realistic oil painting while studying under then prominent portrait painter professor Vratislav Nechleba.

Following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Pištěk's drawings resembled targets with bullet holes, and their composition was accented by the use of monochromatic blocks of colour (August Picture I–III, 1968–1969).

He returned to monochrome paintings in ink and nitrocellulose lacquer in the early 1980s in compositions of artificial architecture (Where I Will Live Next, 1982), which later became three-dimensional labyrinths (City, 1997).

At the height of communist repression during the normalization era, Pištěk's work featured wrapped figures and objects that served as abstract existential symbols.

The motif of a wrapped head (Self-Portrait by the Window I-II, 1981) is in itself terrifying, and the emptiness or ornateness of the background makes this symbol of cruelty even more disturbing.

Pištěk applied his mastery of trompe-l'œil to a series of paintings of gleaming automobile and motorcycle parts (Angelus, 1978; Gold Fever, 1978) or the impersonal objects that surround us (Tonca Still Life, 1981; Homage to Papin, 1981).

He did not want viewers to see only verism, illusion and perfection in his work, but to offset the modern cult of ugliness and hopelessness with a “new professionalism” that sought through flawless painting to evoke an atmosphere or recall a moment or story from the past that we had begun to doubt ever really happened.

Various disconnected narratives intersect (The Price of Elegance, 1973–1974; Landscape with a Honda, 1977), and the illusion of reality is constantly undermined by the painter's interventions.

A seemingly torn canvas is in fact intact (Ecce Homo, 1983); a collage with photographs glued on and scraps of paper held by drawing pins is only a fiction in a painting (Portrait of a Friend, 1976; Midget, 1977; D Day, H Hour, 1980).

Paintings include references to other artists (Dalí in Self-Portrait; Millet in Angelus) and entirely personal messages such as digital numerals showing Pištěk's date of birth in an apparently torn canvas he created for his fiftieth birthday (From My Life, 1982).

In the mid-90s Theodor Pištěk returned to geometrical abstraction in his paintings of empty and stylised architecture, where he worked with various kinds of false perspectives and lighting (Variations 1–6, 1995–1996; Building 1–2, 1995; Down 1–2, 1996; Column, 1997).

The illusion produced in two dimensions is both magnified and contradicted by the impression of a tangible mass emerging from the picture plane and simultaneously guided along lines into the depth of the painting, where it surprisingly loses its shadow and the concrete becomes abstract.

The image becomes empty and is simplified to the minimum.”[15] Pištěk's contemplative Conversations with Hawking (2005–2019) are fragile geometrical constructions that delineate areas of black space interwoven with spot heights and marks indicating the motion of heavenly bodies.

[17] Pištěk's conceptual installation of sacred objects in the former riding school in Hluboká nad Vltavou had a dramatic gradation and scope, and within the context of postmodern scepticism it offered an updating of the psychological values of collectively valid myths.

At the head of the riding school he installed an altar painting with an illusionistic landscape in the Baroque style, to which he added brightly coloured geometrical forms that quoted the American postmodernist Frank Stella.