Description
Odeon, 1990
Grey cloth hardcover, 27 x 21 cm, 202 pages, illustrated throughout in color and black and white. Text mostly in Czech with a summary in English, German and French.
Monograph on Czech painter Jaroslav Král, based in Brno. We cite the summary in the book:
aroslav Kral was born in Malegov near Kutná Hora on December 15, 1883. Within his generation, he ranked among the founding fathers of modern Czech art. While many of his most progressive contemporaries entered the avant-garde cultural scene in the first decade of the 20th century, Kral made his debut only several years later. After graduating from the Arts and Crafts College, where he studied under Professors Emanuel Ligka, Amok Hofbauer, and Jan Preisler, and from the Academy of Graphic Arts in Prague under Professor Vojtěch Hynais, Kral initially painted works strongly influenced by his teachers. Although traces of Cubism appeared in his work before the First World War, he began consistently developing his own artistic vision only after the proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. In 1916, Kral settled in Brno, where he would go on to assume a prominent role among the city’s leading cultural figures, particularly as a member of the progressively oriented Group of Creative Artists. His rise to prominence was due largely to paintings with strong social overtones, often highlighting the struggles of working-class families. To intensify the impact of his work, Kral frequently incorporated elements of Cubist morphology and expressive coloration. By the late 1920s, however, he abandoned explicitly social themes and began developing a unique poetic style, especially in paintings of girls and women. Through these figural compositions he embraced the ideals of modern neoclassicism, which allowed him to express the sober, reflective qualities of his art and showcase his talent as a draftsman. From the early 1920s to the mid-1930s, these qualities also shaped numerous still lifes and figural works in which he demonstrated his affinity with lyrical Cubism. His attempt to capture the symbolic nature of reality during this period often pushed his work to the threshold of non-figurative expression. Around the mid-1930s, Kral radically revised his artistic direction under the impact of global political turmoil and his own firm political convictions. He expressed these not only through his art but also through active involvement in progressive movements such as the Left Front, the ARS Club, the Committee for the Assistance to Democratic Spain, and the Society for Economic and Cultural Understanding with the Soviet Union. A distinctive aspect of this political engagement was his work as a caricaturist and illustrator for progressive magazines and newspapers. In his later career, Kral returned to a neoclassical approach, which enabled him to reconnect more directly with reality while broadening the thematic scope of his work. His paintings at this time were marked by a lyrical quality, but also by growing anxiety over the fate of his nation, increasingly threatened by fascism and the looming danger of war. The final phase of his artistic journey can be described as a progression from idyll to drama. As the forebodings of war turned into the reality of the Second World War, Kral addressed the public with paintings whose allegorical yet accessible language expressed both nostalgia and urgent warning. In March 1941, Jaroslav Kral was arrested by the Gestapo. After enduring a year of suffering in various Nazi prisons, he perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp on March 22, 1942. Painter and draftsman Jaroslav Kral remains one of the leading figures of Czech avant-garde art of the interwar period. Like many of his contemporaries, he aspired to shape the image of the modern artist as both a civic and artistic personality. While he first explored formal experimentation, in times of social crisis and impending war he placed his artistic talents in the service of urgent humanist values.
Jaroslav Král depicted many women, but is hardly known or shown outside the Czech Republic.
A good copy, top edges with some foxing.
