Procházka Antonín 1882–1945

In autumn, 1942

Oil, canvas, frame, glass, 39 × 40 cm, signed bottom left AP Accompanied by a memorial with drawings and descriptions by Antonín Procházka and Linka Procházková. Provenance: from the collection of Bohumil Vykopal.'
Antonín Procházka was a generational comrade of Josef Čapek and Emil Filla, Jan Zrzavý, Václav Špála, Bohumil Kubišta and other representatives of of the founding generation of Czech modern painting. Like them he strove for Czech art to come to terms with the spiritual impulses of the time and come into direct creative contact with the work of foreign artists and began to to participate in the most current developments in European art. Procházka responded to the impulses of European modern painting, although mostly he lived outside the metropolis. The development of his work was therefore more complex, as he sensitively he sought to continue his work in many directions. He was thus influenced by expressionism, the cubist school and the fascination of primitivism to finally to a very distinctive form of classicism. Eventually he created his own world of a dreamlike and disillusioned reality, from which he excluded disharmony, pain and sadness. In his work, Procházka most often returns to the motif of the woman - the muse who symbolizing the seasonal weather, the goddess of beauty and love. His women, playing and bathing children, all spiritualized by motherhood and the divine smile Madonna. He also often returns to the motifs of horses, struggling roosters and playing cats playing. Drawing A. Procházka is an artistic expression in its own right and occupies an important place in his oeuvre. The art of drawing has matured here to the greatest perfection and mastery. Procházka's drawing expression stands out an amazing lightness. Numerous drawings became the precursor of the artist's extensive painterly inventiveness and predestined his work to great tasks that referred to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Sources Albert Kutal, J. B. Svrček