Lot 139

Pravoslav Kotík (1889 - 1970) BOUQUET IN THE WINDOW

From the expert opinion of Rea Michalová PhD: "The painting under consideration, "Bouquet in the Window", is an authentic, high-quality, exquisitely vitalistic and poetically felt work by Pravoslav Kotík, a great artistic personality of Czech modernism, whose work is unusually scattered - and yet the artist's work has an unmistakable, clearly recognizable handwriting. The painting under consideration, "Bouquet in the Window", was created at the very peak of the artist's creative powers - the second half of the 1920s represents a mature and richly realised period in Kotík's work, a time of great concentration, when "the quality curve (...) rose sharply" (M. Pánková). The painting "Bouquet in the Window" is also attractive to collectors because it represents a lesser-known line of Kotík's work, a line that was created in parallel with the artist's figurative work and which, in addition to landscapes, also included the more sporadic subject of still lifes. It is as if these motifs represented a necessary corrective to his tendency towards genre, a "narrative" focused on the multilayered story of man. The literally pastel tonality of colour suggests that we are here in the vicinity of contemporary poetism, which Kotík arrived at in his own way."