Lot 137

František Muzika (1900 - 1974) MASK III

From the expert opinion of PhDr. Rea Michalová Ph.D.: The painting "Mask III" is an original, by its quality and excellent provenance, collector's valuable, highly imaginative work of František Muzika, an extraordinarily educated and sophisticated, memorable personality, whose work belongs indisputably to the Czech and world avant-garde art scene. The painting "Mask III" is a powerfully lyrical work from the period when František Muzika definitively closed the series of tragic parables of the war years. The powerful surge of the artist's new shape fantasy literally buried the atmosphere of the immediately past suffocating times, which Karel Teige wrote about as "seven years of soulless repulsive masquerade". This was stated in the introduction to Muzika's first post-war exhibition at the Hořejš Gallery in Prague (1946), where the artist presented the first smaller painting from the Masks series, which in the final part consisted, as far as I know, of five oils dating from 1944-1947. In the present painting, František Muzika developed a method of fantasy interpretation of reality, based in this case on material metamorphosis inspired by the similarity of shape. An imaginative reading of what he saw allowed him to breathe into the shape of a withered leaf the mysterious form of a woman's face. We can speak of the anthropomorphisation of nature, which was the dominant principle of the previous cycle "Bohemian Paradise" (1943-1944). The hair of the phantom phantom depicted in the painting resembles, as a particularly poignant metaphor, a blazing flame. The painting can thus also be read "in reverse": the mask with the imprint of the female form is transformed by the heat of the flame into a twisted charred leaf that flies over the barren, structurally wrinkled landscape. "František Muzika's Mask III is a work of extraordinary expressive power, a work that, "shrouded in a veil of mystery", "can fascinate and enchant our future dreams with its mysterious hypnotic power" (Karel Teige).

The work "Mask III" from the collection of the important Czech architect Otakar Novotny (1880-1959) is listed in the author's inventory under number 699.