Jan Matulka Art
American, 1890-1972
Matulka studied at the National Academy of Design before traveling to the American Southwest, where he grew inspired by Native-American and Hispanic cultures. Matulka used this inspiration upon returning home to create representational yet distorted artworks. Matulka fluidly oscillates between abstraction and figural painting. He has had many solo exhibitions across NYC and has had his work displayed in notable locations such as The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.(Biography provided by Rafael Gallery)
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Untitled (Study of Classical Drapery)
By Jan Matulka
Located in Chicago, IL
A graphite on paper, study of a classical drapery by artist Jan Matulka. The image is drawn on the back of a typewritten, folded sheet of stationery, from Dyer, Hudson & Co., New Yo...
Category
1930s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Paper, Graphite
Spanish Woman with Guitar
By Jan Matulka
Located in New York, NY
Jan Matulka (1890-1972), Spanish Woman with Guitar, lithograph, 1925, an unsigned proof impression. Reference: Flint 13, only a few impressions known...
Category
1920s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Lithograph
Still Life with Egg Beater
By Jan Matulka
Located in Chicago, IL
A graphite on pencil drawing of Surrealist still life of an egg beater by artist Jan Matulka.
A leading Modernist, Jan Matulka was born in Prague Czechoslo...
Category
1930s Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Graphite, Paper
Still Life with Alarm Clock and Mandolin
By Jan Matulka
Located in Chicago, IL
A graphite on pencil drawing of Surrealist still life of an egg beater by artist Jan Matulka.
A leading Modernist, Jan Matulka was born in Prague Czechoslo...
Category
1930s Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Graphite, Paper
Still Life with Profile and Hanger
By Jan Matulka
Located in Chicago, IL
A graphite on pencil drawing of Surrealist still life of an egg beater by artist Jan Matulka.
A leading Modernist, Jan Matulka was born in Prague Czechoslo...
Category
1930s Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Graphite, Paper
Still Life with Hammer, Palette and Chopper
By Jan Matulka
Located in Chicago, IL
A graphite on pencil drawing of Surrealist still life of an egg beater by artist Jan Matulka.
A leading Modernist, Jan Matulka was born in Prague Czechoslo...
Category
1930s Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Graphite, Paper
Abstraction
By Jan Matulka
Located in Chicago, IL
A handsome black & white abstraction by artist Jan Matulka.
Jan Matulka was an important Modernist that worked with artist Stuart Davis in creating a new form of Cubism, that was ba...
Category
1950s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Ink, Graphite
Recto: "Cubist City Scene" Verso: "Pineapple Still Life"
By Jan Matulka
Located in New York, NY
Recto: ‘Cubist City Scene’ Verso: ‘Pineapple Still Life’ by Jan Matulka (1890-1972)
Pencil, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper
14 ¼ x 27 ½ inches unfr...
Category
20th Century Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Pencil, Watercolor
New England Landscape
By Jan Matulka
Located in New York, NY
New England Landscape, 1925, by Jan Matulka (1890-1972)
Oil on canvas, mounted to masonite
29 ¼ x 21 ¾ inches unframed (74.295 x 55.245 cm)
30 x...
Category
Early 20th Century Cubist Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Acrylic
Jan Matulka VIEW OF THE BRONX Watercolor American Modern NYC 20th Century
By Jan Matulka
Located in New York, NY
VIEW OF THE BRONX Watercolor American Modern Modernism NYC 20th Century Drawing.
Jan Matulka (1890 – 1972) "View of the Bronx," 15 x 20 inches. Watercolor on paper, c. 1920s. Signed lower Right.
In 1907, he came to the Bronx, New York where he had a poverty-ridden childhood with a mother who tried to raise a family by herself. From 1908 to 1917, he studied at the National Academy of Design, and in 1917, received the first Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship with which he traveled and painted in the Southwest and Florida. His work from this period showed a turning towards a more abstract style, replacing his earlier realism.
In 1919, he first went to Paris and then returned in 1927 on a scholarship from the National Academy. In Paris, he was exposed to Cubism, and his painting after that seemed always to carry that influence. He had his first one-man exhibit in New York City in 1925, and by 1930, he and Davis were experimenting with their version of Cubism.
Concurrently for New Masses, a communist magazine, he did satiric illustrations expressing his sympathy for the working classes, and from 1929 to 1931, he taught at the Art Students League where he inspired emerging modernists such as David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, and I Rice...
Category
1920s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Paper, Watercolor, Graphite
Four Nudes in a Landscape
By Jan Matulka
Located in New York, NY
Jan Matulka (1890-1972), Four Nudes in a Landscape, drypoint, c. 1923, signed in pencil lower right margin [also with initials in the plate lower left]. Ref...
Category
1920s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Drypoint
Three-Quarter View of Nude Bathing Seated Near Lamp
By Jan Matulka
Located in New York, NY
Jan Matulka (1890-1972), Three-Quarter View of Nude Bathing Seated Near Lamp, lithograph, 1925, signed and dated in pencil lower right. Reference: Flint 9...
Category
1920s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Lithograph
"Nude and Unicorn, " Brilliant and Important Art Deco Painting by Matulka, 1944
By Jan Matulka
Located in Philadelphia, PA
This brilliant example of Art Deco painting by Jan Matulka shows hints of the modern take on Cubism that the artist worked out with Stuart Davis. Matulka was born in Prague and came ...
Category
1940s American Art Deco Vintage Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Watercolor, Ink, Paper, Gouache
"Grecian Nude and Broken Column, " Art Deco/Surrealist Painting by Matulka
By Jan Matulka
Located in Philadelphia, PA
This brilliant Surrealist composition, with the stylization and exaggerated plant forms of Art Deco, was painted by Jan Matulka in 1944. Both Surrealism and "Moderne" decorative arts thrived in the 1940s, and here the artist draws from both styles. Matulka was born in Prague and came to America as a young man, and trained here and in Paris, where he became exposed to Cubism. He exhibited in New York, created illustrations for New Masses which advanced the interest of American workers...
Category
1940s American Art Deco Vintage Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Watercolor, Ink, Paper
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Previously Available Items
Bather (Nude Bather, Seated, Facing Window).
By Jan Matulka
Located in Storrs, CT
1925. Lithograph. Flint 7. 14 1/8 x 10 3/4 (sheet 18 9/16 x 12 3/8). Very few impressions; no published edition. Fine impression apart from vertical uneven printing line. Printed on ...
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1920s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
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1920s Modernist Mountain Landscape, Framed Colorado Oil Painting, 25 x 30 inches
By Jan Matulka
Located in Denver, CO
A modernist mountain landscape (likely of Colorado) vintage 1930s oil painting by Jan Matulka (1890-1972). Sogmed nu tje artist in the lower right, estate stamped verso. Custom hand-carved frame measuring 30 x 35 inches, canvas size is 25 x 30 inches.
Expedited and International shipping is available - please contact us for a quote.
Provenance: Estate of the artist, Jan Matulka
About the Artist:
By maintaining his Czech birthright and European ties, Jan Matulka played a distinctive role in the development of American modernism. Participating in significant artistic circles in this country and France, he was an enthusiastic emissary of Cubism and Surrealism to both colleagues and students. His independent spirit worked against a successful art career, and personal misfortune and deafness increasingly cut him off from the emerging avant-garde scene. While Matulka experienced a renewed interest in his work before his death, his legacy as an inexhaustible creative force is only now appreciated.
Born on a dairy farm in South Bohemia in 1890, Matulka first pursued his artistic ambitions in Prague, an advanced cultural center that quickly embraced Cubist art and architecture. The intellectual vanguard supported a national revival, which included an interest in folk tales and traditions. For the young Czech artist, the simplified yet dynamic forms of Cubism and folk arts would become a liberating vocabulary, one he could apply to the sturdy underpinnings of traditional education. Throughout the many turns of his artwork, Matulka always brought a firm sense of design and command of drawing to his imaginative musings.
Arriving in the Bronx with his family in 1907, he began studies the following year at the conservative National Academy of Design, winning the $1500 Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship upon graduation. Because of the war, his artistic pilgrimage to Picasso’s Spain was stymied. So he traveled to those areas of the US that were settled by the Spanish, such as Florida, Arizona and New Mexico. While in the Southwest, he found a contemporary equivalent of the “primitive” in pueblo, living for a time with the Hopi. Along with naturalistic watercolors, his work stemming from this period is considered among the first modernist interpretations of Southwestern Indian customs.
Some of these works were finished from sketches upon his return to New York, where he started to fully express the formalist experimentation of Cubism. In the summer of 1920, Matulka exhibited abstract paintings at Katherine Dreier’s Societe Anonyme along with Patrick Bruce, James Daugherty and Jay Van Everen. Through her largesse, he would have a one-man show in 1926 at the Art Center, 65 East 56th Street, but his thoughtless behavior led to her losing interest in his fortunes.
Also upon his return to New York, he married Lida Jirouskova, a librarian whose literary connections led to illustration projects for Matulka. Studying lithography at the Art Students League in the mid-twenties solidified his understanding of graphic principles, and about half of his prints date from between 1925 and 1928. Working in black and white, Matulka developed an understanding of compositions based in shifting relationships of tonality – of contrast of dimension and design. This balance of the linear and the roughhewn characterize even the most colorful of his paintings.
Matulka and his wife traveled to Paris in late 1919 or early 1920, and he established a studio in Paris that he kept until 1934. Meeting with the likes of Gertrude Stein, he stayed current with the tastes of the aesthetic elite, such as Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. Many of his works from this time are reminiscent of Picasso’s mix of neo-classical monumental nudes...
Category
1930s American Modern Jan Matulka Art
Materials
Canvas, Oil
H 30.25 in W 35.25 in D 1.25 in
Jan Matulka art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Jan Matulka art available for sale on 1stDibs. You can also browse by medium to find art by Jan Matulka in pencil, graphite, paper and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Jan Matulka art, so small editions measuring 1 inch across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Winold Reiss, Gordon Grant, and William Zorach. Jan Matulka art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $700 and tops out at $65,000, while the average work can sell for $875.