Lot 177

Jan Bauch (1898 - 1995) MEMORY OF FLORENCE

Jan Bauch called himself a "painting sculptor." He listened to the material and applied it to the canvas with a desire to create a three-dimensional work, dramatic and full of inner struggle. Jan Bauch undertook many study trips that had a profound artistic impact on him. In Montreal, he observed the pulsating metropolis in contrast to the historic houses in the Anglican tradition. In Paris, he was drawn to the colorfulness, vitality, and inspiring power of painting. Greece was a profoundly formative experience for him, as there he beheld the oldest human truths of heroic epics and the warnings of history, which are full of wars, upheavals, and transformations. Italy enchanted him with the perfection of art, which was present at every turn. The variation on the work *Memories of Florence* (1973), currently at the GVU in Cheb, is a fusion of experience and perception of the city’s colorful life, both present and past. Life swirls in a carnival parade in front of the Palazzo Vecchio; acrobats arch and dance, and walking beside them is a papal figure—perhaps it is the very “devil on the papal throne” himself—Alexander VI of the Borgia family.