Jan Matulka (1890-1972)
'Townscape"
watercolor and pastel on paper
14.50" x 20.50"
About the Artist
By maintaining his Czech birthright and European ties, Jan Matulka (1890-1972), played a distinctive role in the development of American modernism. Participating in significant artistic circles in the U.S. and France, he was an enthusiastic emissary of Cubism and Surrealism to both colleagues and students.
Born in South Bohemia in 1890, Matulka first pursued his artistic ambitions in Prague, an advanced cultural center that quickly embraced Cubist art and architecture. For the young Czech artist, the simplified yet dynamic forms of Cubism would become a liberating vocabulary, one he could apply to the sturdy underpinnings of traditional education. Throughout the many turns of his artwork, Matulka always brought a firm sense of design and command of drawing to his imaginative musings.
Arriving in the Bronx with his family in 1907, he began studies the following year at the National Academy of Design, winning the $1,500 Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship upon graduation. Because of the war, he traveled to those areas of the U.S. that were settled by the Spanish, such as Florida, Arizona and New Mexico.
While in the Southwest, he found a contemporary equivalent of the "primitive" in pueblos, living for a time with the Hopi. Along with naturalistic watercolors, his work stemming from this period is considered among the first modernist interpretations of Southwestern Indian customs.
When he returned to New York, Matulka taught at the Art Students League (1924-1925, 1929-1932), where he brought an awareness of contemporary European art movements to a generation of younger artists..
Matulka was employed with the WPA for a mural in the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn, but unfortunately this work is now lost.
With a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1979, Matulka's assumed his place in American art history, and more recent exhibitions of his work re-introduced what the scholar Henry Adams has deemed "one of the most masterful draftsmen who ever worked in the United States."
