Abstract
In the history of Czech art, Jan Čumpelík serves as a time-empty, even tragicomic symbol of the culture of the late Stalin era. His painting in an essential way represents the canon of socialist realism, authoritatively promoted as the pinnacle of progressivity and at the same time its local genesis.
The dogma of formal and content rules, bound to ideological norms, essentially used the retardant bourgeois forms of realism of the First Republic at the expense of the natural continuity of modern art. Outsiders established themselves on the authorities, the authorities became outsiders, because those who did not succumb to pressure risked exclusion from public space and existence on the margins of society. Čumpelík's work and its grasp by contemporary art criticism are a symptomatic example of a process in which culture loses its humanistic mission and becomes one of the tools of totalitarian power.
The process, which began in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and continued more or less clearly until the end of normalization.