Lot 166

Miloslav Hájek (1927 - 2010) HALF NUDE WITH FLOWER

Sculptor and painter Miloslav Hájek graduated from the Josef Wagner Sculpture School at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. He was one of the founding members of the important art group Máj 57, active at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Before the formal establishment of the Máj group, he participated in the Exhibition of Eleven in the ARS gallery in the Melantrich building on Wenceslas Square in 1955. This exhibition provoked harsh criticism from official circles as being completely at odds with the then enforced ideology of so-called socialist realism and later even led to the closure of the gallery. Miloslav Hájek's paintings show the lessons learned from sculpture, which are manifested in the conciseness of a form firmly defined by an outline line and strongly reduced. In the case of Half a Flower from 1956, the artist's usual expressiveness is replaced by inwardness and lyricism.