Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová

Libenský/Brychtová
Stanislav Libenský in 1999
Born	March 27, 1921 Sezemice-Mnichovo Hradiště, Czechoslovakia
Died	February 24, 2002 Železný Brod
Nationality	Czech
Occupation	Artist, educator
Known for	artistic collaboration with Jaroslava Brychtová

Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová
Jaroslava Brychtová in 2005
Born	July 18, 1924 Železný Brod, Czechoslovakia
Nationality	Czech
Occupation	Artist
Known for	artistic collaboration with Stanislav Libenský

Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová are contemporary artists. Their works are included in many major modern art collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Jaroslava Brychtová, a sculptor, and Stanislav Libenský, originally a painter and later a glass artist, met in 1954. They married in 1963 and worked together until Libenský's death on February 24, 2002. Libenský painted and sketched the designs, and Brychtová made clay sculptures from his designs. Since Libenský's death, Brychtová has continued to produce castings. Their work is characterised by simple block shapes infused with subtle colours and nuances.

Stanislav Libenský began his study of glass in 1937 at the Specialized School of Glassmaking in Nový Bor, Czechoslovakia, a region encompassing the Czech-German border called the Sudetenland. When the German army occupied the Sudetenland in 1938, Libenský moved first to the school at Železný Brod, and later to Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, known as VŠUP (an abbreviation of Vysoká škola uměleckoprůmyslová v Praze) from which he graduated in 1944. His first notable series in glass, created in Nový Bor between 1945 and 1948, were thin crystal vessels, delicately etched and enameled with themes from the Bible and Renaissance art.

In 1948 Libenský returned to VŠUP, where he studied under Josef Kaplický, a painter, sculptor and architect who headed the school of painting on glass. Through his dynamic teaching style and modernist ideas, Kaplický had a tremendous influence on his students and thus on the independence of glass as an art form in Czechoslovakia. In 1953 Libenský returned to Železný Brod to become the director of the Specialized School of Glassmaking. It was during that time that he met Jaroslava Brychtová, the daughter of the school's co-founder, Jaroslav Brychta.

Jaroslava Brychtová began to experiment with casting and carving glass in the late 1940s. She founded the Center for Architectural Glass at the Specialized School of Glassmaking in 1950. Like Libenský, Brychtová studied at VŠUP. The war interrupted her education, but she later finished her studies with a concentration in sculpture. Her teachers were Karel Štipl (from 1945 to 1951) and Jan Lauda (from 1947 to 1950). Jaroslava Brychtová's career at the Specialized School of Glassmaking in Železný Brod spanned 1950 to 1984. The couple began their long collaboration in 1954. when Brychtová created a sculptural glass bowl modeled after a sketch of a bowl-shaped head that Libenský had made. According to Libenský, the two worked well together because he was trained as a painter, and she as a sculptor.