Matal Bohumír 1922–1988

The Cat, 1947

oil on panel, glass, frame, 58 × 41 cm, signed. LD MATAL-47.

Provenance: important collection of the owner from North Moravia.

Expert examination by PhDr. Martina Mrázová

The painting was created in the most appreciated period of Bohumír Matal (1922-1988), who at only twenty-three years of age, became the youngest painter of the Group 42. Chalupecký's idea of everyday life in the modern city, imbued with the dreamlike poetics of the surreal, resonated strongly with in the thoughts of the young artist who, after returning from the Nazi labour camps, he almost immediately became involved in the art scene. Already in 1947, i.e. at the time of the creation of the painting under review, he the Brno House of Art also organised his first solo exhibition, comprising eighty paintings. The group themes of man in the city, man and machine or of various constructions and factories on the peripheries of cities were in Matala's in Matal's work naturally intertwined with poetic views of interiors, which often take the form of enclosed theatrical scenes. The solitary actors abstracted into a figurative sign are in his existential paintings are captured in the midst of banal activities and everyday chores. Sometimes, however, they find themselves in the main role ordinary objects, which are usually placed on a table as if standing in the middle of the stage. Apart from the telephone and the sewing or typewriter, the typical props of the Group 42 painters, they were among Matal's favourite scissors, umbrellas, flowers, and various kitchen utensils and water glasses, or even geometric heads interwoven with a network of lines. In the list of motifs that caught Matal's attention, there are sporadic the cat also makes an occasional appearance, and not only in 1947. This motif was also present in The painter also repeatedly returned to this motif in the first half of the 1950s, in the late 1970s, and in the 1970s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the painting under consideration, it is the cat that plays the main role, a common domestic animal, whose flexibility and suppleness Matal managed to perfectly captured by the dynamic, contorted position. Still life with a cat does not try to patronize or idealize the everyday, but charms by the unusualness of a simple intimate scene that reveals the beauty of an ordinary moment. A colourful and spare painting in browns and greens tones is an excellent example of Matal's paintings on paper, which he allowed for some technical finesse, especially in the use of glazes and sphregatures. The shallow, cramped space with a swirling, condensed mass in the middle also formally anticipates the artistic problems that Matal addressed in the later stages of his work.