Lot 173

Josef Čapek (1887 - 1945) BADENDE KINDER

Josef Čapek's paintings of children from the turn of the 1920s and 1930s represent a prized work culminating in 1935 with the exhibition On the Children's Motif in Dr. Hugo Feigl's private gallery, where the work Bathing Children was exhibited. "It is a world of childhood, a world of children's games, a world portrayed not by a cartoonist, whose work can be well replaced by a camera, but seen through the eyes of a child and just as simply and sensitively interpreted as perceived." Svetozor. František Halas and art historian Vojtěch Volavka, for example, also spoke enthusiastically about the cycle: "We are really standing in front of a piece of perfect art, which should be considered one of the most remarkable of our cultural chapters." On the basis of the exhibition, Čapek was approached by the organization Družstevní práce, which published ten of his drawings as postcards. In the same year, the set of drawings represented the Czechoslovak pavilion at the Venice Biennale. These ten drawings include the offered work Bathing Children, which Družstevní práce chose for postcards, in the lower right corner the mark DP (Družstevní práce). So far, we have only been able to see Bathing Children as a reproduction on a postcard. The expertise was made by PhDr. Pavla Pecinkova, CSc.