Antonín Heythum

Antonín Heythum (1901-1954) was an exceptional and distinctive personality of art culture in interwar Czechoslovakia and later in the USA. He made significant contributions to several fields (scenography, architecture, furniture, industrial design, and worked as a university teacher), but his work has been treated in a fragmentary manner, without a broader context, in isolation and limited to only certain fields. The preparation of the book was preceded by a careful mapping of his extensive interdisciplinary work in archives in the Czech and American territories, with the aim of describing and evaluating his contribution to all of these fields. His collaboration with important artists (Man Ray, Erwin Piscator, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Frederic Kann, etc.) and his exhibition activities in more than sixty locations in Europe and the USA are also carefully described. The book monograph is published in Czech-English. The publication contains a complete list of Antonín Heythum's productions, an index and a summary. The text is accompanied by rich pictorial material from the family estate, Czech and American collections (plans, drawings, scenic and costume designs, photographs, manuscripts) and annotated bibliography.