Pavel Havlíček

* 1961

  • "I took photos for Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Elle and a lot of other magazines that the Czech reader probably doesn't even know about. Altogether, I have shot perhaps 160, 170 cover pages in my career, and I don't know how many editorials and fashion stories." - "Some magazines are on the edge of art, it's not just commerce..." - "Yes. I've always tried to do the job as creatively as I can, but you always have to follow certain templates and laws that the magazine has. At the moment, I like the most to take a camera and walk. And look for moments and get to know people and play with it and be absolutely free."

  • "At that time I came to Pavel, he lived in Brooklyn, in a part called Williamsburg. Today it is an exclusive place, but at that time it was the border of Polish, Hasidic and Hispanic cities. Paul lived in the Hispanic part. When I arrived to his house, I was terrified because half the street was burned, shattered, there were three bullets in the main door of the house. When you came out on the street in Williamsburg, you were scared. For the first two or three days, I sat in my room, staring at a dry tree. The windows of the room went into the skylight, so there was not much light. I was thinking about what I did and that I would return to Europe after about a month. I was making a plan to survive with the $ 700 I had for that month. Then, after those two days, Paul told me he was going to Manhattan and asked me to go with him. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. And as we approached Manhattan, I felt the incredible energy and I had tears in my eyes. As we were getting closer and closer to Manhattan, the more tears flowed from my eyes, because I had never experienced something so monumental. The city was definitely pulsating with energy I had never experienced. I realized I had to discover this. That knowledge lasted thirty years."

  • "I was starting illustrating back then. I worked for the New York Times, the New Yorker and many other magazines, and I made a living from it. But I wanted more. Petr Sís told me that my pictures were quite nice, and he gave me a contact of the publishing house he worked with. I came there, they liked the pictures, and the editor-in-chief told me to write a short story and draw it, so they could see that I could draw a story. So, I did that, and I called a month later. We met again and the lady told me that she liked it very much and that they would think about publishing it. And the book was published. The book is called George. At the time, I used the name Paul Borovsky. I still had a career in free art, painting, planned. I was afraid that this commercial work might boycott my artistic career. Today I know it's nonsense, but at that time I thought it would."

  • "At that time, the only places my parents and I visited were the Eastern Bloc countries. We often went to East Germany, we were in Romania, Hungary. The crossing began with those borders where there were barbed wires, loopholes, and soldiers with German shepherds. When you crossed the border, it was suddenly calm. Suddenly one felt that he was somewhere in some clean environment in which one is supposed to live.”

  • "In 1968 we were in our summer house in Řevnice near Prague and my father came unexpectedly and said that we have to come to Prague immediately, that they were closing Prague, that it was being surrounded by the army and that we had the opportunity to get there as the last of the cars. That also happened. Then I remember the occupation. We lived in Žitná Street in Prague 1 and my grandmother in Bělehradská in Vinohrady. My grandmother went to pick me up because my mother went to work, and we went up the Žitná Street, where the main highway is today. We turned around a corner and a Russian tank came out from one side and started shooting at us. The door from one corner house opened and a lady let us in. At that time, people were incredibly kind to each other and helped each other. She let us in, and I remember the bullets flying overhead. The Russian soldier shot at me, at the little boy, and at my grandmother, who was already an old lady and was walking with a stick."

  • "I emigrated with my friend Ivana Šulcová, who was studying at DAMU (Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) at the time. We went together with a bus tour to Yugoslavia, Istria. When we got there, the tour leader told us that we would all have to hand in our passports, because then a lot of people were emigrating this way, and that they would issue us a document with which we could move around Yugoslavia. We refused to give those passports. No one spoke to us since that during the trip. It was clear to them that we were probably emigrating."

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    Praha ED, 08.10.2019

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    duration: 01:17:09
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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I knew from my childhood that I would not live here, that I wanted to do better

Pavel Havlíček  2019
Pavel Havlíček 2019
photo: Post Bellum

Pavel Havlíček was born on October 1, 1961 in Prague. His father, Václav Havlíček, came from a well placed First Republic family, and his professional growth was therefore limited in the 1950s and he worked as a driver. Anna’s mother was employed as a hairdresser. During the occupation of the Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, Pavel was in danger of death when a Soviet soldier shot at him and his grandmother. He attended primary school in Vodičkova Street and was not admitted to a secondary art school twice. He was not interested in studying another field. Therefore, he worked as a cultural officer and earned a living by selling his paintings of Prague on Charles Bridge illegally. He emigrated in 1981 when he got across Yugoslavia by plane together with students of a West German student tour to Munich. He received asylum in Germany. He lived in Munich, Cologne and in 1986 in Amsterdam. He then received a visa to the United States. His goal was New York and to establish himself as a freelance painter. For example, Pavel Opočenský, Albert Oesterreicher and Petr Sís helped him in the beginning. He made a living by selling his pictures on the street and as an illustrator in renowned dailies and magazines, he took pictures in his free time. They published his children’s book George under the pseudonym Paul Borovsky. From the 1990s, he gave up trying to break through as a freelance painter and began making a living by photographing portfolios for modeling agencies. In the mid-1990s, he began receiving orders to create cover pages for fashion magazines, which he photographed about 170 since that. He collaborated with many world celebrities. In November 1989, he was visiting West Berlin just as the Berlin Wall was opening to the West. He first came to his homeland in 1991 and definitely returned in 2016.