Lot 104

Antonín Slavíček (1870 - 1910) SUMMER

From the expert assessment by Prof. PhDr. Petr Wittlich, CSc: "Under a cloudy sky, a dirt road rises diagonally to the left on a grassy hill. Behind its top on the right is a dark green shrub and a view of a distant flat horizon. The picture was painted in the summer of 1897 near Okoř, where Slavíček was used to paint in Mařák's landscape school of the Academy of Fine Arts. It is one of the "simple motifs" that the young painter began to choose under the influence of his older colleague F. Kaván, with the fact that he compensated for the simplicity of the subject by fine processing of details. Cleverly it combines his greens with reddish tufts of grass around the road and symphonies of white flowers, mixed with several invigorating accents of red poppies. Significant is also Slavíček's ability to maintain rich detail in the whole image and conceive it as traditionally focused only on the picturesque part, but rather this is a modern optics in the perception of the landscape, which Slavíček has transformed the traditional genre of intimate landscape painting into a tangible high art. It is important that for the first time the motif of a field path ascending a hill appears here, which will become the main theme of Slavíček's mature landscape painting. It will be repeated in many variants as a modern symbol, expressing the motif of the ascending path, on which human staffage, human fate in the confrontational connection of the earth and the cloudy sky will begin to appear. Slavíček probably appreciated this painting because he exhibited it twice in Vienna (1897 in the Kunstlerhaus and in 1901 in the Miethke Gallery) and reproduced it in Free Directions in 1899. " Landscape painting Summer comes from the collection of the architect Jan Kotěra. Many works in the collection are already part of famous museum collections. The painting Summer was last seen at Slavíček's comprehensive exhibition in the Prague Castle Riding Hall in 1961. It was not in public sight until more than 60 years later, and is undoubtedly a work from Slavíček's best artistic period that brings brightness, energy and the familiar theme of a sunny road in the fields.

Exhibited by: SVU Mánes 1898, no. 23, SVU Mánes 1904-5, no. 59, SVU Mánes 1910, no. 7, SVU Mánes 1932, no. 18, Jízdárna 1961-62, no. 37, Kunstlerhaus Vienna, 1897, Miethke Gallery, Vienna 1901, no. 42 or 50

Reproduced: VS II, 1899, p. 403, Svoboda, 1905, p. 42, M 1910, p. 359, Štech, 1933, p. 123, Matějček, 1947, p. 29, Štech, 1947 p. 28, 109.

Published: Tomeš, jan: Antonín Slavíček, 1966, no. 71., Kotalík, Jiří: Antonín Slavíček, 1965, no. 56.