In the 1920s and 30s Czech photographer František Drtikol created a highly accomplished body of work that included a significant subset of dynamic and evocative nude studies, such as the one offered here. Defying categorization into any of the specific artistic movements of the era, Drtikol’s work stands at the forefront of Czech expressionism in the early-mid 20th century. In this nude study, made during Drtikol’s most productive period in the 1920s, he deploys a female nude against a stage set of abstract geometric forms, creating an entirely distinctive composition.
The difficult and labor-intensive pigment print process, of which the present lot is an example, was the technique that Drtikol used throughout his career but almost exclusively during this important period in the 1920s. While he had earlier embraced more painterly methods of printing – often combining bromoil and multi-color pigment in a single print – he found the pigment print process alone to be the truest way to represent the female form in space as his vision moved away from Pictorialism towards a more Modernist approach to photography.
