Name Marie Uchytilova | ||
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Marie Uchytilová-Kučová (17 January 1924 – 16 November 1989) was a Czech sculptor, medallist and creator of busts and statues of important personalities of the Czech culture. She created the Memorial to the Children of Lidice and designed the Czechoslovak one crown coin, which was in circulation from 1957 to 1993.
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Biography
Uchytilová was born in Kralovice, into a family of a clerk. During 1945 and 1950 she studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, under Otakar Španiel.
In 1956 she won a public competition to design the Czechoslovak one crown coin, one of the most used currencies in the country for decades.
She died in Prague.
Memorial to the Children of Lidice
In the late 1960s, she began working on the monumental Memorial to the Children of Lidice, a Czech village burned out by Nazis during the World War II. She worked on it without any contract, along with her husband Jiří V. Hampl. The memorial depicts 82 children killed in the extermination camp in the Polish town of Chełmno. She deliberately decided not to create faithful portraits of the children, she intended it to be a monument to all child victims of war horrors. She died in 1989 and her work remained unrealized up to the mid-1990s, when the Danish city of Albertslund and other—mostly foreign—investors donated the amount of money needed to cast the sculpture in bronze.
The first thirty statues were installed in Lidice in 1995, the last were revealed on 10 June 2000, thirty years after the beginning of her work and eleven years after the death of the creator. The sculpture is oriented so that the children watch the graves of their fathers, grandfathers and friends:
In 2013, the Czech President Miloš Zeman called it "the most beautiful and saddest memorial I've ever seen" and decided to give the sculptor a state award in memoriam.
