Tree
1925
17.87" x 11.87" Framed: 28.25" x 21.25"
Works on Paper, watercolor on paper
17.87" x 11.87" Framed: 28.25" x 21.25"
Works on Paper, watercolor on paper
Signed lower right
Estate stamped verso
Estate stamped verso
Around 1925 Matulka began a series of paintings and watercolors of large, gnarled trees. These works relate to his visit, in 1921, to the farm in Czechoslovakia where he had spent his childhood. The tree motif became repetitive template on which Matulka experimented with the breadth of modernist concerns - - - color, space, and abstraction of nature. In these works we also see the influence of other painters he came to admire such as Leger, Demuth, Lhote and Cezanne.
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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