Les Amis de Suzanne Renaud et Bohuslav Reynek

Bohuslav REYNEK, Suzanne RENAUD,
Jean LEBRAU, Andrée APPERCELLE.
Correspondance / Korespondence.

Bilingual edition in French and Czech.
Translated from the French Petr Řezníček.
Bibliographies. Editorial note.
Illustrations in color hors-texte: eleven works by B. Reynek.
Black and white illustration within the text.
Published with support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
and the Renaud-Reynek Endowment Fund (France).
Format: 12.5 x 19 cm. 248 pages. Softbound, illustrated cover.
ISBN: 2-910544-19-2.

Czech poet and printmaker Bohuslav Reynek (1892-1971) and his wife, poet Suzanne Renaud (1889-1964), wrote many letters to their friends in France from their home in Petrkov, Czechoslovakia. After the Second World War, Renaud and Reynek began corresponding with Jean Lebrau (1891-1983), who was born and died in Moux, and Andrée Appercelle, who was born in Grenoble, where she lives. Both poets, one lived in a winemaking village in the Aude, a dry and fragrant region, the other in a city nestling in high, snow-capped mountains. Lebrau, a poet–winemaker and a fervent Catholic, enjoyed visiting the monks at En-Calcat Abbey. Appercelle loves animals, supports communism and travelled to Czechoslovakia in the post-Stalin years. United by their art and sense of beauty, the four poets shared their love of nature and humble creatures, their faith in the human soul and their hope for a better world.

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Le Don Quichotte de Reynek / Reynkův Don Quijote
followed by Il y a bien longtemps / Je to už Dávno
by Annick Auzimour and Jiří Šerých

Bilingual edition in French and Czech.
Translated from the French by Petr Turek and from the Czech by Benoît Meunier.
Colour illustrations: two sections outside the text, 16 and 32 pages, and 34 reproductions within the text.
Format: 21 x 21 cm, softbound, illustrated cover, 144 pages.
Number of copies: 300.
Published by Romarin, Grenoble, in October 2016.

Published with assistance from the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Fonds de Dotation Renaud Reynek (France).

The public first saw the Don Quichotte album by Bohuslav Reynek (1892-1971) at the opening of an exhibition at the Jean Damien bookshop in Grenoble on 7 November 1960. The Czech engraver, who dreamed of arid, fragrant southern landscapes all his life, had long been interested in the epic tale about Cervantes’ hero. This set of 14 prints dedicated to the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, the artist’s only work based on a literary theme, attained its most accomplished form and definitive composition in the Don Quichotte series. Czechs saw it for the first time on 2 April 1965 at the opening of an exhibition in Brno attesting to the creativity of the artist, who was unknown to the general public until then.

In this book, two authors who were close to the artist during his lifetime and know his work recount the genesis of Reynek’s Don Quichotte. Its scenes spring to life in Petrkov, the village in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands where the artist lived and set his visions in the snowy landscapes of Central Europe. Today we are presenting these previously unpublished texts, illustrated with Reynek’s prints and plates and supplemented by art historian Jiří Šerých’s moving recollections, Je to už dávno – Il y a bien longtemps.

Bohuslav Reynek, Suzanne Renaud, Jean Lebrau, Andrée Appercelle. Correspondance – Korespondence

Reynek’s Don Quixote. It was a long time ago