Lot 101

Jaroslav Král (1883 - 1942) HARVEST

Jaroslav Král was especially famous for his female nudes and portraits. His efforts to perfect the artistic form led to a tendency towards a cubist form, which is fully manifested in his work Harvest. The meticulously constructed composition, executed with delicate, supple strokes, gives the impression of a gentle summer breeze. The colouring is in the spirit of colourful mirroring of two main tones - summer sky and golden grain. Unfortunately, Jaroslav Král's talent as a painter was prematurely ended by his deportation by the Gestapo and death in Auschwitz. The work bears an exhibition stamp from Mánes in 1940. "The presented painting "Two Women in the Field (Women in the Landscape)" is a beautiful and fully typical work by Král, introducing the last phase of his work taking place in the "shadow" of the Second World War. In an exacerbated social climate, under direct threat of German aggression, the extraordinarily sensitive painter began to heighten the poetic impact of his works. He returned to the expressive form of classicism, as the pure aesthetics of cubist forms could no longer effectively mirror the contemporary content. The present painting "Two Women in the Field (Women in the Landscape)" exemplarily mirrors the historical situation at the end of the 1930s, when the artist's homeland and the entire European continent were in imminent danger. Jaroslav Král then begins to use the motif of man in the landscape of his home symbolically in his works. In this painting, which precedes a larger composition with the same motif (Two Women in the Harvest, Oil on canvas, 72.2 x 92 cm, 1938, MG Brno, inv. no. A 1172), he captures the half-figures of two women engaged in hay-making, one of them still seemingly working peacefully, while the other, firmly holding a golden grain in her hands, seems to be about to leave the field and head home. Clouds are also gathering in the sky, and the wind of the coming storm is stirring the trees on the horizon. In addition to the symbolic subject matter, which takes on eloquent meanings in the atmosphere of pre-war threat, the painting "Two Women in the Field (Women in the Landscape)" is characterized by a sculpturally enclosed solid volume (originating in Picasso's neoclassical paintings from the 1920s) and a warm, old-master colour palette. It is a work that stands out in the artist's utmost typical diction - dreamy expression and slight melancholy are constant attributes of King's painting."