watercolour, ink, paper, mount, frame, glass, 25,8 × 19,5 cm,
signed. PD J. ŠÍMA, 2 catalogues from 1970 and 1977 enclosedBefore the mid-twenties, Josef Šíma touched upon the abstract
painting, his development was influenced by his meeting with Dutch representatives of the
De Stijl Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Šíma
also worked closely with Devětsil and mediated contacts
between the Czech and French avant-garde. Already then, he had shown
his extraordinary feeling for balancing shapes and chords of colour tones.
His paintings, despite their technical rigour, have a very fragile
and delicate. Notable is a series of watercolour etchings
entitled Paris (published in 1922 by Aventinum),
with which he freely accompanied poems and texts by French and Czech
poets and writers (Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, Alfred
Jarry, Guillame Apollinaire, Jaroslav Seifert...). It is necessary to mention
Šíma's close relationship to the circle of French poets with whom
The Czech journalist and poet Richard Weiner (1927) introduced him to René
Daumal, Roger Vailland and Roger Gilbert - Lecomte
he shared similar philosophical and artistic views. Together they founded the group
High Game, in which poetry and painterly sensibility were intertwined as a kind of
inseparable. It is from this period that the drawings and paintings come,
that are now in the possession of major French institutions
(Centre Pompidou, Paris).
The members of the group met in Šíma's studio. Notable is his
work from the period beginning in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when
approaching surrealism, but never quite merging with it.
An interesting example is Landscape with a Triangle (1932) or Landscape
at Yébles (1929) or The Return of Theseus (1933), in which the artist came to
to refined symbols, based on meditations on experiences
of nature and mythological stories.
Šíma was so sensitive to pre-war and wartime developments that he
he even interrupted his artistic work for a few years before
he slowly started painting again during the 1950s. Then, of course.
in the final decades, he reached another peak in his paintings, whose
the main subject became the transformations of light and the relationships between the fragile
shapes and colour tones. This stage is equally important, if not
even
more rewarding than the early period. Finally, I would like to recall,
that the painter František Gross, who had the opportunity to meet Josef Šíma
personally met Šíma, wrote in his memoirs that he was the finest
man he had ever known.
His work is represented in Czech and foreign public
and private collections, in the National Gallery in Prague, in the Brno
Moravian Gallery, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
PhDr. Jiří Machalický The presented work "Untitled" is, in my opinion, an authentic, intimate
drawing work by Josef Šíma, one of the greatest figures who contributed to the history of
established the shape of our modern art, an artist who linked Czech
and French avant-garde, and whose work is characterized by an extraordinary
distinctive poetics of an imaginative character.
The work under consideration, "Untitled", is executed in a beautiful chamber format,
represents the last phase of Šíma's work (1969-1971), a phase that
represents a surprising culmination of the artist's ever-changing
yet so internally unified. This phase is Josef Šíma's
associated with a new organization of pictorial space, which changed from an expansive
openness flooded with light, is filled again with a linear network or hatching
flowing into certain focal points. In the present work, it is in this spirit that
we encounter a fine linear "mesh" of diagonals, at the intersections of which
concentrate - in a kind of magic triangle - imaginary nodal
points of space. These are the focal points in which a part of the previously
of scattered, unstable, free-flowing light energy. On the diagonal
the work is permeated by the gray "sphumate" shape echo of the hyperbola, which
Šíma perceived as an important geometric curve having a number of internal
meanings ("The dramatic will of the hyperbola to meet its asymptote.
The hyperbola can be seen as the perspective of a circle." Josef Šíma, 1968).
If in previous paintings he linked the hyperbola with the idea in it
"wedged" body, here it is as if the echo of the hyperbola itself becomes a body that
floating through space. The present work "Untitled" presents
a mature example of Shim's recurring theme of the mental, internal
illuminated landscape, one of the works in which the painter completed his previous cycle
of hyperbolic spaces.
Regarding the provenance of the work from the Swiss collection, it can be clarified that the artist's set of
of the artist's works came to Geneva in 1969 in connection with an exhibition at the Galerie
Engelberts.
From the expertise of Rei Michalová, PhDr. D. Lit.: Catalogue D'EXPOSITION 44, Galerie Engelberts, Geneva 1977,
limited edition, cf. p. 24.
Attached is the expert opinion of Rei Michalová, PhD. D., attached 2 catalogues from 1970 and 1977.
Provenance: private collection Zurich, Switzerland
#23024119
auction 65
65th auction of Fine Art, Antiques, Design and Glass
Information at aukce@sypka.cz, mob. 608 958 322.
