Uncle Remus Tales

These illustrations are among Kalinovsky’s most distinctive works. They earned him two major international awards — a silver medal at the Leipzig Book Fair and the Golden Apple at the 1977 Biennial of Illustration Bratislava.

Kalinovsky approached the American folktales of Joel Chandler Harris not as light children’s stories but as something darker and more ironic — a trickster world where everyone survives by wit and instinct. His drawings are sharp and textured, full of tension and dry humor, far from any pastoral charm. The wolf, the rabbit, the fox — all seem slightly human, each trying to outsmart the other.

The result is a strange, magnetic book: tough, unsentimental, and alive. You can almost feel the scratch of his line — energetic, nervous, deliberate. Kalinovsky strips away the prettiness and shows the raw nerve of these tales — where good and evil constantly trade places, and survival itself becomes an art.