Matal Bohumír 1922–1988

Man in the City, City in Man, 1947

signed in pencil bottom right Matal 47., watercolour, paper, 16,5 × 11 cm, mount, frame, glass Consulted with Mgr. Martina Šviková.
For the young, exceptionally talented artist Bohumír Matal, who at the age of 23, became a member of Group 42, whose paintings were immediately in Paris at an exhibition of the most important young artists of Czechoslovakia and already in 1947 he had his first solo exhibition in the representative House of Art in Brno, the world changed after February 1948. His paintings were not even remotely close to the directive, constructionist optimism, and all of his work to date has been labeled as an undesirable and dangerous pro-Western formalism that must be combated and which should have no place in the exhibitions of the new socialist state. For a painter who spent part of the war in the harsh conditions of the labour camps, ...the crushing weight of the totalitarian system was once again upon him. Matal was forced to retreat to the seclusion of his studio and began to seek security in his paintings in the traditional motifs of portraits, self-portraits, still lifes, flowers or views of the city, in in which references to modernist painting were often mixed with new elements and symbols.