Lot 108

Vincenc Makovský (1900 - 1966) RECLINING WOMAN

In his sculptures, Vincenc Makovský pushed his work to the very edge of abstraction, stripping the individual forms of the human body of their representational qualities and replacing them with a nearly monumental mass. The artist experimented with plaster, stone, bronze, and assemblage materials such as fabric, paper, and wax, shaping his ideas into three-dimensional objects as well as high and low reliefs. Important milestones in Makovský’s early career included his admission to the Mánes Society (1931), his participation in the groundbreaking Poesie exhibition (1932), and his involvement in the first exhibition of the Surrealist Group (1935). The original sculpture dates from the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, and today the marlstone original, with a copper sheet edge and an embedded iron hook, is housed in the National Gallery in Prague under the title Reclining Woman. In this work, the artist applied a Cubist analytical method, through which he fundamentally disrupted the traditional figural form. He divided the female nude into a system of separate, stylistically simplified fragments. The relief was preceded by a sketch titled Composition, likely created during his stay in Paris. The relief on offer, representing one of the pinnacle works of Czech interwar sculpture, was acquired by the previous owner from the artist’s heirs.