Study for Spanish Landscape

Dating from 1923, Šíma’s Study for Spanish Landscape documents a fascinating period in the artist’s transformation from figurative painting to abstract expression, as he methodically reduced architectural motifs to geometrically pure forms. After relocating to France in 1921, he first worked in the town of Henday, on the northern border with Spain, depicted here, where he worked as a designer in the nearby Montjoie glassworks. This allowed him to experiment with the transparency and lighting effects that later informed his painterly expression. Dominated by a stylised tower and a characteristic boat in the foreground, the monumental vertical composition serves as a visual anchor between the abstract architecture and the viewer. The artist works with a limited colour palette, in which the earth tones of the façades contrast with the intensity of the blue sky and the vivid green foreground. The buildings on the canvas levitate without a solid connection to the ground, creating an interweaving mass that reverberates off the predominantly blue background. The contrast between white and dark passes through the flattened volumes, illustrating Šíma’s interest in Purism and Constructivism. In contrast to the final version of Spanish Landscape, Šíma experiments here with more expressive geometrical stylisation and a more limited colour palette that foreshadows his subsequent evolution in connection with the avant-garde group Le Grand Jeu and the inner circle of the magazine L'Esprit Nouveau. The differentiation in painterly style in individual parts of the painting testifies to the author’s experimentation with expressive means at a moment when he was coming to terms with the current waves of the avant-garde after arriving in Paris. 

In the context of Czech modern art, this study represents an important illustration synthesising the domestic tradition with progressive, European tendencies. This is emphasised by its inclusion in Šíma’s first group exhibition in Prague’s Topič Salon in 1925, which presented 110 of his works from 1916–1925. In the composition, the author builds on previous work from his period of residence in Le Havre, where he experimented with geometric forms and their mutual relationships on a surface. Here, Šíma transforms the Spanish motif into something approaching a structure of signs, in which architectural elements attain autonomous artistic value without losing their representative function. The painter’s journey towards his own visual language, teetering on the edge of abstraction, is expressed in the work through the softening and dematerialisation of the elements depicted. They are permeated by white from all sides, while the surfaces and lines start to function as independent compositional elements. The painting is thus an immediate precursor to one of the author’s most significant early works, Blue Landscape (Memory of Henday, Spanish Cloister) from 1924, with which it shares a basic formal and colour arrangement, and opens a path to Šíma’s later abstract work. The painting was reproduced in František Šmejkal’s monograph (Josef Šíma, Prague 1988, p. 67, fig. 54). Assessed in consultation with Prof. J. Zemina and PhDr. R. Michalová, PhD. The expert opinion of PhrDr. K. Srp is attached: “[...] The painting is a significant example of the state of modern European painting at the beginning of the 1920s: flat elements, which start to be suffused with light, are already emerging in the realistically observed and reinterpreted scenes. Šíma managed to detach himself from reality and transform it into his distinctive vocabulary of forms, which constitute the foundational elements of his future visual language. [...].”