13 Václav Špála 1885 – 1946 Mountain Breeze, 1915

Signed in pencil lower right VŠ 15, inscription in pencil on the reverse no. 546., illegible, 73, Vánek hor. 30 × 21.8 cm, drawing, pastel, paper, mat, frame, glass. 

Expert opinion by PhDr. Rea Michalová Ph.D. attached.

Provenance: The work comes from a significant Moravian collection.

The presented work, titled "Mountain Breeze" (Vánek hor), is an authentic, collector's highly valued, Cubistically stylized, and supremely Vitalistically tuned, very charming drawing by Václav Špála, an artist of European significance and a leading figure of the founding generation of Czech modern art.

Špála was a relatively rare type of artist in Bohemia: he relied most heavily on his senses and intuition. From the beginning, his works aimed at sensuality and the expression of states of well-being and happiness.

His work began to approach Cubism in 1912, when he started to fragment large forms into wide, diagonally placed brushstrokes. He was so preoccupied with this new method of rhythmizing shape and color that in the years 1914–1915, he reached the very border of abstraction.

The presented work, "Mountain Breeze," is a beautiful example of the fusion of Špála's optimistic painterly sensuality with Cubism. It is precisely in drawings like this that the artist's primary tool for Cubist metamorphosis is perhaps best heard: a vigorous artistic gesture, an abrupt drawing line, primarily in the form of a kind of hacking and hatching of the shape.

The figure of the young girl, whose skirt is being ruffled by the fresh mountain breeze, revealing her graceful legs, falls within the line of Špála's famous "Village Women" (Venkovanky), which became one of the symbols of the author's painting and concentrate the scope of his creative interests.

Coloristically, this work is dominated by Špála’s characteristic contrast of "animalistic" red, in which the entire figure of the girl is rendered, and fresh blue. The authenticity of the depicted situation is further confirmed by Špála's own memories of spring days when "the wind carried merrier clouds (...) and how nicely it blew into the girls' skirts...".