Lot 205

Vlastimil Beneš (1919 - 1981) FARM IN BROWN FIELDS

n object does not have to be poetic to be perceived as poetic; in Beneš's paintings, it is color that poeticizes objects and landscapes. Influenced by Renaissance painting, Cubism, modern neo-primitivism, and folk art, he developed his own recognizable concept of space, the volume of objects, and their place in that space. His frequent subjects—village buildings, industrial landscapes, mines, and city outskirts—did not seek recognition among the slogans of the time. They stood as if outside their time. Through his works, the author brought to life the universal elemental nature of the world and remained firmly rooted in the present in the full sense of the word. For Beneš, the 1960s were a time when he was able to present his work to public criticism for the first time in a major exhibition (1962 in Hradec Králové), when he acquired a new studio space in Prague-Vršovice, which became the subject of several of his paintings, and when he undertook his trip abroad to Italy. Beneš preferred to paint in the fall and did so most often, saying himself that he was an autumn painter. The melancholic view of the landscape with a farmstead is typical of the artist's work in terms of both painting and subject matter, which he fully developed in the 1970s. The large-format painting Brown Landscape with a Farmstead from 1965 ranks among the earlier works in the context of this motif and shares common features with, for example, the landscapes of Ota Janeček, with whom Beneš associated, even though he was considered a rather unsociable loner. The title and date of the painting are located on the verso.