Robert R. Reid Printing & Book Design

It's thanks primarily to Robert Reid that the art and life of George Kuthan remain available to us today. The two met at Reid's printing shop in Vancouver in 1951, shortly after Kuthan's arrival in Canada. Born in Klatovy, Czechoslovakia in 1916, Kuthan was a medical student at the University of Prague when the Nazis closed it, in 1939. It was at this time that he turned his attention to art, which he studied at Prague's School of Decorative Arts for the next six years. After the war he went on to study painting and various forms of printmaking in Paris for several years. What few published details of his life exist indicate he enjoyed some success while there, making his decision to emigrate to Canada somewhat puzzling (especially since he first landed in Saskatchewan!). Shortly after arriving in Vancouver, he was introduced to Reid.

"George was as addicted to making linocuts as I was to printing. For the rest of my time in Vancouver, he became a major part of my printing career. I used his linocuts in every imaginable way. But as far as Vancouver's art community was concerned, George was an anomaly. He didn't do the kind of abstract paintings that were in vogue at the time, and he wasn't a commercial illustrator as they were typically thought of." Robert R. Reid

With a wife and young family to support, Kuthan was obliged to take a job at a local sawmill. But throughout the 1950s he also functioned as the de facto in-house illustrator for many of Reid's commercial printing jobs. His illustrations, decorations and initial letters (all printed from the original linocuts and wood blocks) were widely used in B.C. Library Quarterly, Canadian Literature magazine, and several books Reid was hired to design and print. He also had a one-man show at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1959 (a detail from a printed brochure promoting it, and other gallery events, is shown at right).

In the early 1960s, perhaps thanks at least in part to Robert Reid's influence, Kuthan purchased a platen press to add to his basement studio. Renown Vancouver artist, printer and type designer Jim Rimmer (Pie Tree Press) relates a humorous story about the press's arrival:
"George Kuthan had bought a platen press. I can't recall the make, but it was either a Westman & Baker or Chandler & Price. It was being moved by Gerald Giampa and a handful of friends into the basement of a house in North Vancouver where George Kuthan lived.

"The move from the truck to the basement entry was a difficult one, and Kuthan spent most of the time fretting and wringing his hands in despair at the difficulty involved, and was constantly urging the volunteers not to damage the press.

"One of the group came up with a plan to keep Kuthan occupied. They led a length of rope from the front basement window into the front yard. The other end led through the basement and was "tied to the press." Giampa instructed Kuthan to keep a firm, steady tension on the rope, and to not release the tension until instructed to, as the rope was all that was stopping the top-heavy press from tipping over during the move.

"While the moving team got back to the job of struggling the press over sheets of plywood through the backyard of the house, Kuthan sweated and pulled on the rope, too occupied with his own task to fuss or get in the way. Once the ticklish part of the move was over, one of the group yelled 'Okay, George, let it go,' and they hurriedly snaked the rope through the basement and out the back door, untying it from the apple tree they had attached it to."

Beyond the commercial graphic work done for Reid, Kuthan's artwork - characterized by influences of Czech folklore, medieval woodcuts and oriental miniatures - appeared in just a handful of books. The first, Kuthan's Menagerie of Interesting Zoo Animals was initiated by Robert and published in 1960.

The next was a small volume published by A.R. Tommasini, one of several dozen annual 12mo Christmas books he did. Titled Snowbound, it consists of verse by John Greenleaf Whittier, with linocuts printed in various colors by Kuthan. The colophon states the edition was 600 copies; the copy shown at right has this further statement on the colophon: "Forty copies printed in Berkeley, California, U.S.A., for the friends of George Kuthan." Tommasini issued a second, larger format edition of 200 copies in 1970, for members of the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco and the Zamorano Club of Los Angeles.

That same year Macmillan Canada published Vancouver: Sights & Visions, reproducing over 150 pen and ink drawings by Kuthan that had been published in the Vancouver Sun. "In this delightful book, George Kuthan looks at his adopted city - as he says 'through a sensitive visitor's eye.' Each of his pen and ink drawings, over 150 of them, captures the mood o f the moment or the essential character of a Vancouver's scene." The book was issued in both hardcover and softcover formats.

In 1964 Kuthan himself published the limited edition Aphrodite's Cup (printed, as was Menagerie, by Ib Kristensen), under the imprint Honeysuckle Press. The book presents 25 three-color erotic linoleum cuts, each image in the style of ancient Greco-Roman pottery. The book was reprinted by Mel Hurtig in 1976.

George Kuthan died, far too young, in 1966.

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