Lot 78

Bohumil Kafka (1878 - 1942) A BOY WITH GRAPES

Kafka's masterful work Boy with Grapes can be placed in the author's first Prague sojourn after his return from Paris. In 1908, a year before Boy with Grapes was written, Parisian critics praised Kafka's work as "passionate and delicious, bizarre and natural". It was from Paris that Kafka drew the creative trends that in the first decade of the 20th century represented the transition from the family school to the classicizing E. A. Bourdelle and monumentalizing corporeality as the humanist mission of art. Kafka's Boy with Grapes is a response to a purely Art Nouveau motif presented in the most dynamic and modern way. At the same time, he supplied the entrance hall of the Art Nouveau Municipal House with two large reliefs, Flora and Fauna, inspired by Gauguin's paintings.

This important Czech sculptor Bohumil Kafka is best known as the author of the monumental equestrian statue of Jan Žižka in Vítkov or the monument to the painter Josef Mánes on the embankment near the Rudolfinum building. In his works he was open to the influence of Symbolism and in his early work also to the decorative requirements of Art Nouveau. At the time of the formation of the Czechoslovak state, after the death of Stanislav Sucharda, he replaced his teaching position at the Prague School of Applied Arts. The offered work is published in the book Bohumil Kafka His Works from 1900 to 1918, Prague 1919, on page 19.