Jinřich Štyrský

ISBN: 80-7215-138-X|Published: 2001|Pages: 176|SOLD
Binding: Softbound|Format: 160 x 180 mm|Graphic design: Pavel Lev, Studio Najbrt

Photography occupies a special place in the diverse work of the painter, graphic artist, poet, and essayist Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942). He began to take photographs in the early 1920s, but did not show them in any great number till the first exhibition of the Group of Surrealists in Czechoslovakia, in 1935, with the large cycles Frog Man (1934) and Man with Blinkers (1934). These cycles were followed by Parisian Afternoon (1935). Štyrský was the first important Surrealist photographer to take shots of the legendary ruins of La Coste, the Marquis de Sade’s castle (1932). His photographs, chiefly of shop windows, circuses, shooting galleries and funereal objects, resonate with the Surrealist poetry of the early 1930s, but are also rooted directly in his own unique imagination, reflecting traumatic experiences of his childhood. The author of the publication, Karel Srp, art historian, curator of the Prague Municipal Gallery, and author of many books on modern art, is the leading authority on Czech Surrealism.