Svatopluk Pitra (9 March 1923 – 15 July 1993) was a Czech graphic designer, illustrator, cartoonist, designer of animated films and painter. He graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. At first he became known as a cartoonist. He began working on animated films in the late 1950s. In collaboration with directors such as Břetislav Pojar, Jiří Brdečka and Stanislav Látal, he designed cartoon and puppet films. In 1963 Pitra emigrated to Canada. He lived in the US from the mid-1960s.
Life and work in Czechoslovakia 1923–1963
Svatopluk Pitra was born on 9 March 1923 in the small village of Štěnec (now part of Jenišovice). His childhood was spent in a former mill with his mother's parents. In 1929 he moved to Poděbrady along with his mother and older brother Bohumil, where he started attending elementary school. Even many years later he could still remember his first school assignment: drawing six rows of vertical lines that gradually transformed into ones.
Starting in 1935 he attended the grammar school in Vysoké Mýto. Due to poor grades, in fourth year he had to leave for a two-year Amelioration School, which he successfully completed. During his two years of military service in the years 1945 to 1947 he was assigned to the cartographers. Subsequently, he went to work at the Pipe Rolling Mill in Chomutov as a technical draughtsman. As a reward for discovering an error in technical documentation, he received a recommendation for university studies in 1951 and was accepted to the Special Studio of Animated and Puppet Film under professor Adolf Hoffmeister at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. His classmates included Vratislav Hlavatý, Zdeněk Kirchner, Ladislav Rada, Šárka Kašpaříková (Šefranková) and Jaroslava Nesvadbová. During his studies he married and shortly thereafter divorced Milica Kudrnová, who became the mother of his only son Torsten.
While working at the studio Pitra did not shun drawing based on a model, but he very quickly found his own style, at first relying on a ruler and French curve, with which he constructed pronounced figures formed with a strong line and sharp contrasts of black and white areas. He was just as masterful in handling lettering, which he placed in his drawings in the form of various signs and labels. Pitra admired the drawings of František Bidlo and above all the portrait shorthand of his professor Adolf Hoffmeister, for whom the medium was a "mask that is truer than the face". Pitra also understood drawing as a record of his internal life that was to be rendered with as economical means of expression as possible.
Telling is the account of the difficulties he encountered when trying to take out the First Republic magazine Simplicus from the University Library. Although they acquiesced in the end, they apparently first "interrogated" him on what he needs the magazine for and then demanded a "confirmation of a true need to study the item".
Pitra had his first exhibition in 1957 along with schoolmate Vratislav Hlavatý in the prestigious Czechoslovak Writer Gallery in Prague. Originally, professor Hoffmeister himself was to appear in the former Topičův salon vystoupit i sám professor Hoffmeister, but in complete secrecy he relinquished the whole space to his two students. He introduced them at the opening for the show Caricature and Other Unpleasantries as a new hope for Czech humorous drawing, which in his words was wasting away in the shroud of the magazine Dikobraz. At the exhibition Pitra displayed cartoons and photo montages, clips from his graduate animated film Klobouk ve křoví[Hat in the Bushes], anti-war and advertising posters, and designs for record sleeves and book covers.
In his review of the exhibition, Miloš Macourek praised Pitra's "keen-edged wit and political involvement" and expressed the conviction that the author would no doubt soon establish himself in the broad field of practical graphic art as well. He was not wrong in this prediction. After completing school, Pitra began to work as a graphic designer for domestic and international trade fairs; among other things, he participated in the graphic design for the Czechoslovak pavilion at the EXPO 58 World's Fair in Brussels. Much like his schoolmate Ladislav Rada, he also designed advertisements, posters and record covers for Gramofonové závody – Supraphon.