Beneš Vincenc 1883–1979

Still life with a bouquet

oil on canvas, frame, 72 × 56 cm, signed. PD V. Benes
Vincenc Beneš's works from the first half of the century are particularly appreciated, including the bouquet under consideration here, painted in a relaxed realistic manner, with a tendency for the light to etch the objectness of shapes and forms. I judge that it was created as already an opposition to the cubist lesson, when after 1914 the artist changed his style back to object reality, following Slavíček, Průcha and foreign impulses. Compositionally, the painting acts as an assemblage, evoking Cézanne's principles of picture construction, yet the local tones familiar from Beneš's inter-war and post-war bouquets already appear in the colouring. A related painting is, for example, Still Life with Watermelon (NG, inv. č. O-3343), where we find the creative principle of still-life painting in a denser and more mature painting rate. The painting under consideration fits authentically into the qualitatively related paintings of Jan Slavíček from the early 1920s, to the intimate work of Fišárek or Žufan. The typical signature of Vincenc Beneš has been valid since the mid-twenties, before that the paintings are often unmarked or signed in various ways. From the expert opinion of PhDr. Mgr. Michael Zachar.