Vladimír Machaj (1929 – 2016) was a professional painter, graphic designer and illustrator. His illustrations of books, in particular, for children and fairy tales, have made him famous and brought him various awards. Surprisingly, 40 years after completing his studies in applied graphic arts, in 1996 he quite unexpectedly began to design postage stamps. Machaj studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague from 1949 to 1956. He attended a specialised studio that focused on applied graphic arts, led by Antonín Strnadel. He also passed several semesters of study into postage stamp design during which he was supervised by Cyril Bouda.
Machaj dedicated many decades of his life to illustration and book design. He worked as an art editor of the Mladé letá publishing house and prepared illustrations for many publications, children’s cult books, books of fairy tales, myths and fables and books for the youngest children as well as for world literary publications. He has been awarded the most prestigious Czechoslovak, Slovak and international prizes for his illustrations.
After 1996, he created a collection of ten postage stamps, as part of Slovak postage stamp design. His designs of a mountain goat, the European bison, a mouflon and forest berries were followed by more stamps inspired by efforts to protect nature and feasts.
He attempted to continue the tradition and created postage stamps as works of applied graphic arts with high artistic value. Taking into account all specific requirements of small-format graphics, Machaj designed the postage stamp as a whole; he kept the picture and the text in balance, in a unifying, mostly single-motif composition, including the details. Among his works we can find lyrically and poetically tuned Easter and Christmas postage stamps, romanticising natural scenes as well as the portrayal of protected fauna and flora with scientific precision. This is illustrated by the WWF series of four postage stamps that bear the motive of the European wildcat. They were issued as part of the World Philatelic Programme for the depiction of endangered species. Apart from a faithful rendering of the cat, Machaj also created emotionally-coloured portraits of this precious endangered species as an impressive expression of its relationship with nature.
Postage stamp design always meant a lot to him, although he only started to design them later in life. The rather extensive collection of postage stamps by this legendary illustrator is an integral part of his body of graphic works, and an original authorial and artistic contribution to Slovak postage stamp design.
Antónia Paulinyová
