(Praha 1900–19 74)
“Strom XXVI ve žluté ”, signed F. Muzika 57, on the reverse inscribed with the no. 785, oil on canvas, 34 x 24 cm,
on stretcher

Illustrated in:
Nové obrazy Františka Muziky, introduction by František Šmejkal, Prague 1963, p. 9 (catalogue enclosed)
František Šmejkal, František Muzika, Prague 1966, ill. 138

Exhibited:
Nové obrazy Františka Muziky, Fronta exhibition hall, Prague,
1 December 1963 – 1 January 1964, cat. no. 21
La Biennale di Venezia, XXXII. Esposizione Biennale Internationale d’Arte 1964, Venice, 20 June – 18 October 1964, Czechoslovakian section, cat. no. 22

Exhibition Label on the reverse:
La Biennale di Venezia, XXXII. Esposizione Biennale Internationale d’Arte 1964 (inserted in type script: name of the artist, title and addr.
of the owner)

Provenance:
Private Collection, California, USA

We are grateful to Dr. Michael Simek for his assistance in cataloguing this work.

After 17 years, thanks to society-wide changes in former Czechoslovakia, a new independent exhibition by František Muzika, whose work is inseparably linked to imaginative tendencies, could be held in 1963. Following the communist putsch in 1948, Muzika’s imagination was forced to surrender to the doctrine of socialist realism and so the few works that were created during this period can be considered the purest development of Muzika’s imagination. The paintings exhibited at the end of 1963 at the Fronta exhibition hall included “Tree XXVI in Yellow”, one of the author’s works of seeming surface which reveals and also conceals the secrets of life, woven out of an unending tangle of nerve fibres, vessels and other life-giving tissue. Rehabilitation of Muzika’s artwork, not only of the pre-war and war period, but also his newest work, was confirmed in the 1960s by additional exhibitions following this exhibition. And these were not just exhibitions in Czechoslovakia, where Muzika was a respected figure. These were chiefly exhibitions in Italy and particularly in the Baukunst Gallery in Cologne in the late 60s and early 70s, where Muzika was included among the most important authors of surrealism and imaginative art.

Rather than just a tree, “Tree in Yellow” (1957) is a mysterious sensitive object, a live being growing right out of the ground, with a naked soul interspersed with a subtle network of coloured veins, vessels, nerve fibres and knots, evidence of its complicated internal happenings.
František Šmejkal, František Muzika, Prague 1966, p. 151

Tags:
František Muzika, Frantisek Muzika