War Motif

In 1944, at the age of twenty−one, Chad joined the resistance movement in Zlín. On the night between February 23 and 24, the Gestapo came to arrest him and he was shot dead when trying to escape. A War Motif is his last work ever made. The drawing, done in rapid strokes and with dramatic expressiveness, shows two figures leaning over their victim. The manner of depicting the soldier figures has aspects of caricature, their grotesquely repulsive expressions clearly allude to their angry and aggressive characters. The treatment of the drawing is imbued with a certain automatism, the contours are not clearly outlined, the lines overlap and multiply in places, the figures themselves are not visibly separated from their surroundings but blend with them instead. This is not a realistic capturing of reality, but a gesture of protest and disgust over the frenzy of the times.