Visiting the Dead

The painter and illustrator Jaroslav Panuška was an exceptional figure among Prague artists especially in the second half of the 1890s. Panuška did not seek harmless ghosts and human features in them but rather depicted their devilishness, some quintessence of evil. His figures are gaunt, as if non-material, their limbs being covered with shrivelled skin. A dead mother returns to take her child along; a skeleton comes for his skull that dominates the still life of a desk. The dead revenge on the living for previous sins, their worlds interconnecting, ethical principles disappearing. Nonetheless, many paintings of Panuška also reveal his peculiar sense of humour and hyperbole; however, they are neither agreeable nor compassionate but rather derisory and ironising.