Rostislav Barto started drawing his “grotesque” pictures in the late sixties. Most of his subjects are people from the artistic milieu: artists or, quite often, art critics. He usually created hybrid characters inspired by various real-life prototypes, at other times remodeling and distorting the faces of real people. These little sheets of paper reflect the state of mind of a not-so-young artist exhausted by many years of professional solitude and disillusioned by the failure of his dialogue with the artistic community.  We can see his bitter, sarcastic smile as he depicts  men and women whose physical  repulsiveness appears to him as being the consequence and the expression of their moral deficiency, of their reluctance to regard the search for beauty as the ultimate meaning of art or, what is more, the meaning of life. That’s what makes these professional artists so ugly.  They have always asserted that art is only valuable insofar as it displays a utilitarian or political approach to reality, and now, their mere existence, their appearance and their mask-like faces make them look like the living antithesis of this genuine, natural joy that beauty brings into art.