Lot 89

Zdeněk Rykr (1900 - 1940) STILL LIFE WITH A VIOLIN

From the expert opinion of PhDr. Rea Michalová Ph.D: "The presented painting "Still Life with Violin" is an authentic, high-quality, exceptionally valuable early work by Zdenek Rykr, an author whose work belongs to the most stimulating manifestations of Czech modern art of the 1920s and 1930s. As a theoretician, he saw direct connections between modern and old art, because he did not attach such radically innovative meanings to modern art as was the custom at the time. As an advertising graphic artist, he became particularly famous for his collaboration with the company Orion. In 1920, when the canvas under consideration was created, Zdenek Rykr was only twenty years old, but he was very self-confident and had several exhibition successes behind him. If several of Rykr's still lifes from 1920 are distinctly Cubist, in the case of "Still Life with Violins", as well as for example "Still Life with Keys" (18 x 32 cm, 1922, NG Prague), we can talk about a kind of Cubist "new picturesqueness", which was the term used by Josef Čapek, whose Rykr paintings attracted attention. This is no longer the Cubist "heavy-minded" concept of Cubism, but a new concept adequate to the post-war era, which emphasized sensory contact with reality .In the submitted "Still Life with Violin", Zdenek Rykr brilliantly managed to express the vital force hidden in the objects of human pastime, in a wonderful form of synthetic cubism, a form that expresses the regularity, order and dynamism of a new life." "