Josef Šíma (1891–1971)

Josef Šíma is an essential exponent of European modern painting and served as one of the primary mediators between the French and Czech avant-gardes in the interwar and postwar periods.

 

Šíma came from an artistic family. The beginning of his artistic career was impacted by being drafted and sent to the front lines during World War I. After returning from the war, the young painter studied with Jan Preisler at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and later at the Czech Technical University in Brno. His first postwar works expressed a fascination with modern technology and the influence of social Civilism, then en vogue. In 1920, as part of a generation of emerging avant-garde artists, he was involved in the establishment of the artistic group Devětsil; a year later, he set out on a journey to France. From 1922, he worked as a fashion designer (designing fabric for Raoul Dufy and gowns for Paul Poiret, among others), illustrator and contributor to periodicals such as Lidové noviny, Stavba, Pásmo and the art review Disk. From 1922 to 1924, he produced sensitive landscapes and paintings from France (Ships in the Harbour, Le Havre).

 

In 1923, Šíma decided to move to Paris, receiving French citizenship in 1926. There, he became part of the circle of artists and poets associated with Le Grand Jeu; other members included the poets René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland. With the help of wide-ranging practices (drugs, alcohol, sleep deprivation, breath-holding and meditation techniques), the group’s artists tried to transcend the borders of reality. Based on deep sensory experience, Šíma arrived at a representation of nature that he transformed into a kind of intangible, dream-like imagination; in this way, he developed a very specific style known as poetic abstraction. In the late 1920s, he approached Surrealism, employing strong Symbolist elements; he often used the motifs of crystals, cosmic eggs, levitating torsos, amorphous smudges, capillary-like trees and “detached” landscapes of freely flowing space. During the 1930s, he turned to drawing techniques (particularly India ink on paper) to capture the painterly sensitivity with greater spontaneity and started to work intensively with themes from ancient myths (The Fall of Icarus, 1936, The Return of Theseus, 1933–1934) and the concept of light as the union of all things. With the coming of World War II, Šíma ceased to paint for almost ten years. The works of the 1950s then emerged as a synthesis of all previous approaches.