Šíma Josef 1891–1971

Composition, 1960

ink, paper, mount, frame, museum glass, 23,5 × 15,5 cm, signed lower right J. ŠÍMA 60
"... I think that for a painter, lightning, fire and light are the elements that ...the theme of my painting is light and the unity of all things. And the unity of all things is the unity of matter, whose most subtle manifestation is light - light not as a mysterious fluid illuminating objects, but as a force that creates the existence of objects..." Excerpt from Josef Šíma's letter to Jiří Kolář, 10 September 1959. In. Šmejkal. Josef Šíma. Prague Odeon 1988, pp. 264, 278. For Josef Šíma, Czech painter, illustrator, representative of poetism, living in France since 1920, drawing and graphic art was an important graphic art was a significant component of his work, on a par with painting. Subtle fine works, often drawn in pencil or ink, recording the outlines of scenes, human faces, or symptomatic objects (an egg, a crystal, a tree), as well as vague abstracted records, created a parallel to his painting work. Their realisation sometimes preceded or influenced the paintings. In drawing, Šíma leaned towards a simple thin line that delicately but accurately and surely defined and taught shape, and yet in the most economical way capturing only the essentials. The offered drawing by Josef Šíma from 1960 belongs to the second peak period of the artist's work, in which Šíma turned to abstracted with scenes of indeterminate formations and their clusters, whose central motif was light as a fundamental formative creative force. A departure from reality and figuration towards abstract creation as a personal interpretation of basic primordial and transcendent qualities of energy was related to Šíma's philosophy influenced by the study of archetypes, the unconscious, Eastern philosophy and his belief in the wholeness of the world, which he had been pursuing since the 1920s. when he became a founding member of the French group High Game (Le Grand Jeu)."