Lot 155

Josef Šíma (1891 - 1971) MIDI LE JUSTE

From the opinion of PhDr. Rea Michalová Ph.D. The "Midi le juste" is one of Šíma's late "chef-d'oeuvers" and, moreover, an extremely rare document of how the author maintained a dialogue with his own past, memories, ideas in the late 1940s and 1950s. "The Meridian (Midi le juste)" is a late variation of the painting created in 1928 and now in the collections of the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. Summer landscape, in the new elaboration of the motif, this ghost, which ignites the human imagination with its uncertainty, is a kind of condensation of the vibrating light environment into the " energy core", the abstracted "unreal body ". An important role in the overall "radiant" effect of the work is played by the painter's creative process, when he was the first to lay out the basic construction of the painting with charcoal on the canvas, which he then covered with fine layers of paint applied by touches of a vertical brush. The shop and the drawing infrastructure are not completely "absorbed" by the color, which gave the author a special effect, which can be characterized as a painting that lives, pulsates, breathes. The special title of the work "Midi le juste" ("Meridian") is inspired by the central notion of Paul Valéry's poem "Cemetery by the Sea", which, like Shim's painting, refers to that special moment of the day when the sun rises at the highest point of its orbit. it stops for a moment and the shadowless landscape takes on a ghostly appearance. "

Provenance: PAB Collection; Loudmer, ESTAMPES - DESSINS - TABLEAUX - PHOTOS - LIVRES ILLUSTRES MODERNES, Paris, France, 26. 11. 1994, nr. 76

Exhibitions: VI Bienal de São Paulo [VI. Biennale in São Paulo], Museo de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil, September - December 1961; Josef Šíma, Impact of Light, Gallery Moderna, January 23 - March 2, 2014

Published: (monograph) F. Šmejkal, Josef Šíma, Odeon, Prague, 1988, p. 148