Lot 158

Miloslav Hájek (1927 - 2010) HALF NUDE

The original plaster model of Hájek's famous sculpture Halfnude depicts the theme of a sleeping or dreaming girl, which is often varied by the artist. His work brings with it a combination of modern and archaizing elements. The morphology of his sculptures cannot be denied a line of modernity or lyricism of expression. With their dramatic poses and cubist form, they represent a subtle and elegant distinctive direction in the modernist conception of the May 57 group, which claimed the legacy of Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Kubišta, Filla, Zrzavý, Kremlička, Šíma and Tichý. In 1945-1951 he studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, in the studio of Professor Josef Wagner. He was a member of the Free Association of Cheerful Artists and the Czech Fine Arts Fund. Although the Máj 57 group, of which he was a part, moved more towards abstraction over time, Miloslav Hájek excelled primarily in his sovereign figurative expression with abstracted shapes in the spirit of modernism. Miloslav Hájek subjected the nude of a girl with her head in her hands to several treatments. The work comes from an important Czech collection.