Lot 176

Kamil Lhoták (1912 - 1990) THE GREAT TARGET

From the expert opinion of Ing. Libor Šteffek, MBA: "The assessed work, The Great Target, was presented at the exhibition of Kamil Lhoták at the Gallery of the Czechoslovak Writer in Prague in 1966, exhibited under number 21. Given the authenticity of the conception, the sovereignty of the painting's execution, the excellent provenance and the clearly documented history of the painting, it can be stated that it is a magnificent, extremely representative and highly collectible work, which occupies one of the leading places in the artist's lifetime work. The offered work is also the largest painting of the artist with the motif of a target that did not end up in state galleries. The work is also registered in the List of Kamil Lhoták's paintings, which the artist himself maintained, under the number 1294/4. This high-quality work was created in the second half of the 1960s, when the symbol of the target in various forms was one of the artist's most typical motifs. 

After his entry into the world of painting in the 1930s, Kamil Lhoták gained complete confidence in his conception and means of expression within a few years, and by the beginning of the 1940s he was already a comprehensively equipped artist who transferred his subjects onto canvas with immediacy. At the same time, he concentrates on capturing motifs close to his heart during this period, so that 1940 and 1941 become the peak years of this phase of his work, accompanied by his signature initials KL, when the artist's works are created without major corrections by environmental influences. After the formation of Group 42, Kamil Lhoták entered the circle of like-minded artists whose motto was to depict the city and "the world we live in".
Kamil Lhoták's works began to gradually turn away from the motifs of the city to the landscape in the early 1950s. It is not, however, an idealised landscape, but on the contrary a landscape in which man and his influence always play an essential role. At the beginning of the 1960s, there is a fundamental change in his conception of landscape. This new approach, represented by the concept of Green Ireland, which juxtaposes two large, colour-contrasting areas, is subsequently described by Prof. František Dvořák and the professional public as a completely innovative conception of the seemingly already exhausted topic of landscape design. At the same time, new motifs enter his work and his works acquire a new dynamism. Thus, Lhoták presents us with, for example, the motif of a wire eagle, a desert machine or a target. The motif first appears in his painting in 1964 and, after the culmination of the inclusion of this motif between 1965 and 1967, it remained there until the early 1970s. Lhoták presents his targets in various forms. In some cases, the painter incorporated them as one of the sub-artifacts in his work, but mostly they play the main role and draw the viewer's attention to them. Such is the case in this work, where the painter places a visually and coloristically very distinctive target in the foreground, while at the same time placing it somewhere in the open landscape, into which he gives us a glimpse on both sides of the target itself. In this way, he links the solitariness of the main object with his conception of landscape, which he came up with in the 1960s. At the same time, this work can also be described as one example of the painter's reaction to the pervasive influence of Op Art in Czechoslovakia at the time. However, Lhoták's work impresses not only with this interconnection of thought, but also with its pure artistry, extraordinary lightness and sovereignty of painting execution. After it was painted, the painting The Great Target hung in a place of honour in Lhoták's apartment and was highly valued by the painter. For years he refused many offers to sell it and sold it only at the end of his life in 1989. The painting then spent the next 35 years in the collection of its current owner. The motif of the target, as one of the characteristic features of Kamil Lhoták's work, is represented in many gallery and private collections. Among the most important representatives here we can include the works The Big Target 2 (1281/39, 1965) or The Big Target (1304/14, 1966), located in the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové and the Benedikt Rejt Gallery in Louny, respectively. Among the most important works in private collections are the Target (1319/29, 1966) and the iconic Red Target (1375/38, 1967)."

Published: Šteffek, L.: Kamil Lhoták A Thousand Paintings. Prague, 2024. pp. 330, 331. Inventory number: 1294/4.