Surrealist Landscape
1935
17.5" x 21.75" Framed: 25.25" x 29.375"
Works on Paper, Gouache on paper
Region: North America
17.5" x 21.75" Framed: 25.25" x 29.375"
Works on Paper, Gouache on paper
Region: North America
Signed lower left
Estate stamped verso
Estate stamped verso
This work is an example that perfectly illustrates Matulka's methodical treatment of certain subjects. In the late 1920s and 1930s, he spent time in Gloucester creating a prodigious number of drawings and gouaches. He landed on a formula in which nautical objects such as anchors, capstands, pulleys, and bells were arranged against the backdrop of a bay with a shipwreck on the horizon. He obsessively worked and reworked this setup, usually in ink with carefully drawn crosshatchings. The compositions became more and more abstracted until the shapes dissolved into a pure abstraction of colorful, flat patterns.
About the Artist
(1890 - 1972)
Jan Matulka was born in 1890 in a small town southwest of Prague, in what later became Czechoslovakia. In 1905 he took his first art classes in Prague, and two years later his family emigrated to the United States, settling in the Bronx, New York. He then began taking classes at the National Academy of Design, continuing there through 1917. After he finished his training, he moved into a studio apartment in Manhattan and met Lida Jirouskova, whom he married in 1918. Throughout this time he traveled quite extensively, visiting the southwest United States, Czechoslovakia, Paris, and Prague. In 1917 he lived in New Mexico, where he adopted a cubist style and painted some the earliest modernist works in the Southwest. In addition, he also painted directly from life, recording ceremonial scenes and daily life in the Pueblos.
In 1926 Katherine Dreier arranged his first important one-man exhibition at The Art Center, 65 East 56th Street in New York. However their relationship soon began to sour due to disagreements between the two.
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