Frantisek Drtikol Czech, 1883-1961

Galerie Lefebvre New York is pleased to present a special exhibition of works by Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol, a leading figure of the international avant-garde movement of the 1920s and 30s.

An atypical figure, a deeply introverted mystic with an international career, Drtikol revolutionized nude photography in the 1920s. He gave up photography at the height of his career in 1935 and retreated to a discreet villa in the suburbs of Prague to devote himself to meditation and painting. He died forgotten by the art world, only to be rediscovered towards the end of the 1970s. Major figures such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karl Lagerfeld began collecting his work. Today, Drtikol's work is featured in major modern art collections such as those of MoMA in New York, LACMA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Born in 1883 in Příbram, a small town in Bohemia, young Frantisek aspired to be a painter, but his father, a grocer, steered him toward photography, which he considered more lucrative. He went to study at the Munich Photographic Research Institute, a training center considered among the most avant-garde in Europe. In 1925, he exhibited his photograph "The Cactus" at the famous International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. The most fashionable artists of the Art Deco movement, such as Man Ray and Pierre Chareau, encountered his work for the first time there, and it subsequently inspired their own. Drtikol won the gold medal, thus launching his international career.

From the beginning to the end of his career, Drtikol's preferred subject was the female nude. Photographs from the 1910s and 20s attest to the importance, in the artist's development, of late 19th-century symbolism as well as various European avant-garde movements. His female figures with long hair, imbued with Manichean symbolism, evoke the work of Klimt or Franz von Stuck. But the arrangement of his nudes, from the 1920s onward, on large geometric forms, also reveals an exploration of simple shapes, akin to the abstraction of František Kupka or Constantin Brancusi. As in abstraction, Drtikol sought to reach the Idea through the simplification of forms. The use of light contributes to the same quest for the absolute: the pronounced chiaroscuro, rendered in the manner of Caravaggio or Rembrandt, devours the bodies while simultaneously revealing their essential forms. In the late 1920s, Drtikol took a further step into abstraction with increasingly close-up framing, which cropped the nudes in such a way as to reveal certain parts of the body while obscuring others. By the end of his career, the bodies of flesh had completely disappeared, giving way to slender silhouettes cut from cardboard: the female nudes closest to his inner life.