Until the First World War, Janoušek worked as a teacher. In 1914 he was drafted as an infantryman to the Serbian front, where he was wounded and taken to a hospital in Ljubljana.
Shortly after he returned to the front, he had a breakdown and shot himself in the leg. He ended the war as a clerk in a military hospital.
After the war, he began studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he graduated after three years. He subsequently studied in Vienna (1922), Paris (1927), and Italy (1929). In 1924, he began exhibiting with the Mánes Association of Fine Artists. Following an
ideological split among the members of Mánes towards the end of the 1920s, most of the artists returned in 1932, joined by the Surrealists Štyrský and Toyen as new members.
In 1931, Janoušek became acquainted with the work of the French Surrealists at the Prague exhibitions, and a year later he exhibited with them at the first major exhibition of Czech Surrealism, held at the Mánes Building. It was aptly titled Poesie 1932. He continued to exhibit regularly with the Mánes Association, although art critics paid more attention to the imaginative art than to Janoušek's specifically expressive work within Surrealism, which tended to be ignored.
Janoušek moved towards an exaggerated biomorphic morphology, inspired by the forms of bodily organs. This pulsating, interacting, and expanding mass is based on the fundamental shapes of the crystal and the ovoid, as in one of his greatest paintings, Picture, produced in 1935.
Although an artistic outsider in his own day, František Janoušek has attracted much attention among younger generations of artists. In this exhibition, the influence of his expressive Surrealism is evident, for example, in the works of Marek Meduna and Josef Bolf. The latter
says: “His surrealist idiom is very confused and contemporary. It is reminiscent of things that are not yet present in certain concrete manifestations. Nevertheless, it is not abstract. That is currently very appealing to me. Janoušek's paintings also emanate a sense of anxiety, which we can attribute to the artist's premonition of what is to come in the world. Now I have discovered the late 1930s for myself; they are charged with a ghostly energy. The imaginary world of that time is somehow running away, and yet everything that is to come is already contained in it.”
PICTURE, 1935
b. 1890 in Jesenný, Kingdom of Bohemia
d. 1943 in Prague