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Vaclav Vytlacil"Woman Reading in an Interior" Vaclav Vytlacil, Loose Brushwork PortraitCirca 1915
Circa 1915
$29,000
£22,172.04
€25,537.72
CA$40,637.89
A$45,368.38
CHF 23,772.35
MX$555,353.56
NOK 301,909.10
SEK 284,661.95
DKK 190,590.60
About the Item
Vaclav Vytlacil
Woman Reading in an Interior, circa 1915
Signed lower right
Oil on canvas
16 x 20 inches
As a child, Vytlacil had taken art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1913, he received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he worked with John C. Johansen, an able portraitist whose expressive style resembled that of John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. On completion of his studies in 1916, he accepted a teaching position at the Minneapolis School of Art. Vytlacil saved enough money to go to Europe in 1921. He hoped to study Céanne's paintings and the work of Old Masters. He spent a month in Paris, then went to Prague (his parents were Czechoslovakian). He toured Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. The paintings he sought out-works by Rembrandt, Titian, Veronese, Cranach, and Holbein—gave him a new perspective. "I am, for the first, beginning to understand some of the laws the old masters used in their paintings and wonderful things they are too. It was no hit or miss affair with them, neither was it just feeling: but rather real solid laws and facts that not only one used, but they all used."
In Munich, Vytlacil enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art, where Worth Ryder and Ernest Thurn were fellow students. When Thurn left the Academy for Hofmann's school, Vytlacil soon followed. Vytlacil worked with Hofmann throughout the mid 1920s, first as a student, and subsequently as a teaching assistant. With Thurn, he organized Hofmann's 1924 summer school on the island of Capri.
The contact with Hofmann made Vytlacil reconsider his own artistic approach. "More and more I realize that drawing is the bottom of it all and to paint without being able to draw leads only to grief."
Vytlacil returned to the United States in 1928. During the summer of that year, at Ryder's invitation, he gave a series of lectures on modern European art at the University of California at Berkeley. The next fall he joined the faculty of the Art Students League. Although he encountered opposition from Reginald Marsh, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the league, Vytlacil gave a series of public lectures on modern art that had lasting importance. George L.K. Morris was only one of many young Americans lured into modernism after hearing Vytlacil speak.
Vytlacil returned to Europe after a season at the league. In Munich he attempted to interest Hofmann in teaching at the league. He then set up a studio in Paris, where he gained first-hand knowledge of Picasso, Matisse, and Dufy. Over the next six years, Vytlacil divided his time between Paris, Capri, and Positano. In 1931, he took a five-year lease on a villa in Positano and opened an informal school. He returned to New York in 1935, and the following year helped found the American Abstract Artists. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, he taught at a variety of places—the Art Students League, Queens College in New York, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and other art schools. In 1946, he rejoined the faculty of the Art Students League and remained there until his retirement in 1978.
Even before Vytlacil went to Europe, his paintings showed a decided inclination toward modernism. In the expressionistic Village Scene of 1918, and other work from the the same decade, Vytlacil compressed space and balanced his compositions through an adroit use of color. His still lifes and interiors from the 1920s reflect an understanding of Céanne gleaned partly from his discussions with Hofmann:
"No one in my former period of training had ever spoken of the properties of the two-dimensional plane, that planes built volumes, not lines, that volumes were three-dimensional and that the negative space in which they exist also has a three-dimensional volume."
During the 1930s, Vytlacil pursued two distinct and very different kinds of art simultaneously. He also began doing constructions. These were usually of discarded wood from a department store opposite his studio. He occasionally added cardboard, string, metal, and cork to these works. Though he experimented with constructions for several years, Vytlacil eventually gave them up as too limiting. He continued to prefer the spatial challenges of painting. Over the years Vytlacil occasionally ventured into complete nonobjectivity; still most of his work is abstracted from recognizable subjects.
During the 1940s and 1950s there was a new found freedom in Vytlacil's paintings. Energy replaced form as primary concern, and his subjects—landscapes, still lifes, the human figure—possessed a spontaneity unsuspected from his earlier work.
- Creator:Vaclav Vytlacil (1892-1984, American)
- Creation Year:Circa 1915
- Dimensions:Height: 23 in (58.42 cm)Width: 26.5 in (67.31 cm)
- More Editions & Sizes:Unique WorkPrice: $29,000
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1841215079082
Vaclav Vytlacil
Born in 1892, Vaclav Vytlacil was a highly educated and gifted artist, early at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and later at the Art Students League. In the 1920s, his travels to Europe and studies of the old masters helped him gain artistic perspective and knowledge. At the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, Vytlacil met and befriended Hans Hofmann, becoming his teaching assistant. After returning to the US in 1928, Vytlacil became a member of the Art Students League faculty and successfully persuaded Hofmann to teach at the League as well. In 1936, he became a co-founder of the American Abstract Artists group and taught at Queens College in New York; the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California; Black Mountain College in North Carolina; and the Art Students League. Vytlacil was honored with solo shows at The Carnegie Institute, Montclair Art Museum, the Phillips Memorial Gallery, the Krasner Gallery, University of Notre Dame, Rochester Art Gallery and others.
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