Lot 135

Otakar Mrkvička (1898 - 1957) NELSON MINE

Otakar Mrkvička's father worked as a photographer in Příbram, where he took valuable contemporary records of the mining town and corners that no longer exist. Perhaps the impulse to create a work documenting the mining accident in the Nelson III mine near Osek was born there. A mining accident took place in 1934 - due to austerity measures, some regulations were not followed very carefully and an explosion occurred in which 144 people died. The Ossetian tragedy was also reflected in the poetic work of Bertold Brecht. Most of the sacrifices were made only in 1938. In the 1930s and 1940s, Otakar Mrkvička went through a darker phase of his work with a strong social line, which continued until the occupation and resonated with its urgency during the war. Otakar Mrkvička painted the dark corners of the city from which illuminated faces emerge like ghosts, which the author paints with the care of a collector of human destinies. It is not surprising that the mining accident shook him so much that he also printed the miner's death mask in his artwork as a warning memento mori.