Lot 106

Pravoslav Kotík (1889 - 1970) WOMAN ON BALCONY

In 1927, during the preparation of his inaugural major solo exhibition at the Rudolfinum, Pravoslav Kotík was still in his late thirties. By that time, he had accumulated nearly twenty years of artistic activity, thirteen years of experience as a secondary school teacher in Prague, Turnov, Nová Paka, and Mladá Boleslav, membership in the Mánes and Umělecká beseda societies as well as in the HoHoKoKo social group, and participation in twenty group exhibitions. To this record must also be added his repeated visits to France, which he had undertaken regularly since 1924. Kotík’s sojourns in Paris provided him with essential artistic experience that exerted a profound influence on his work. Upon his return, a significant transformation in his artistic production became evident. A pivotal moment in Kotík’s artistic development was his assimilation of Picasso’s lessons and their distinctive integration into his painterly practice, which to a considerable extent brought his classicizing period, dated 1920–1924, to a close. This phase of his oeuvre also includes the oil painting Balcony, whose expressive form—characterized by Cubist reduction of shapes and a Fauvist color palette—directly reflects his Parisian experience. Despite the evolution of his artistic language, the human figure remains the central focus of Kotík’s work, a recurring motif to which he consistently returned. In this period, only the urban backdrop was supplanted by rural scenery.