DRTIKOL FRANTISEK (1883 1961) Nude composition

Sale 2103 - Lot 26

Unsold

Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000

DRTIKOL, FRANTISEK (1883-1961)
Nude composition. Pigment print, 10x8 1/4 inches (25.4x20.9 cm.), mounted to a period board, with Drtikol's debossed hand stamp on recto; housed in a folding jacket, with his name and address on the front cover. Circa 1925

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Few photographers have rendered the female nude with the graphic power of the Czech avant-garde artist Frantisek Drtikol. Trained as a painter, Drtikol began his career as a portraitist, in 1905, specializing in photographs of artists and writers. Subsequently, he created experimental soft-focus Pictorialist studies that were influenced by the stylized nudes of the Art Nouveau movement. By the 1920s, he had affiliated himself with the avant-garde and focused exclusively on the nude female model.

Like his American and European contemporaries, Drtikol drew from the emerging modernist idiom and deftly employed dramatic lighting, skewed angles, and bold compositions. His work reached its apogee in the period between the wars when he explored erotic motifs in an accomplished series of one-of-a-kind pigment (or carbon) prints. These beautiful objects highlight his integral role in the modernist movement and represent a new, unique vision of the Roaring '20s woman.