Kamil Lhoták (1912-1990)

Evening, 1980, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left Kamil Lhoták 1980; on the reverse, an artist’s label with the title of the work and its specifications. Painting dimensions: 71 × 61 cm; mounted in the original artist’s frame; overall dimensions including the frame: 91 × 81 cm.

The painting is listed in the catalogue raisonné of works by Kamil Lhoták under number 1980/34.

Provenance: The work was originally purchased by MUDr. František Dedek directly from the painter Kamil Lhoták.

Authenticity: The originality of the work has been consulted and confirmed by SPKL; an attached Birth Certificate of the Painting by Kamil Lhoták is included.

Expert report: PhDr. Rea Michalová, Ph.D.

From the Expert report:
The assessed painting Evening is an original, representative, and highly evocative work by Kamil Lhoták in terms of both subject matter and atmosphere. Lhoták is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most versatile artistic figures of Czech culture in the twentieth century.

The painting Evening is dated 1980, a period that may be characterized as a mature phase in which the artist consolidated his “classical” themes. The year 1980 was also successful for the artist in terms of further recognition: he received the Herder Prize in Vienna, awarded to the most significant figures of European culture. He thus became the first Czechoslovak painter—and one of the few visual artists ever—to receive this honor.

The painting Evening is a splendid example of the artist’s magical realism and intense colorism. This work excellently represents Lhoták’s modern perception of nature in the sense of natura naturata—nature that is created and continuously shaped. The painter himself emphasized that he was always interested in nature only in the form in which it merges with human intervention, with civilization and its technical manifestations. “It is always some kind of deformation that creates new beauty and pictorial quality. An old machine in a meadow, a concrete ring seen through a forest clearing, a balloon above the landscape, garish posters in fields, etc. It is a new poetry…”

In the presented work, Kamil Lhoták created a thoughtfully composed scene depicting a view into a park or orchard on the outskirts of Prague, suggested in the background by the motif of a smoking factory chimney. The most striking element of the composition is the centrally placed, maximized cone, resembling a tent, in front of which rests a small red ball. Trees with lush crowns symmetrically frame this scene, in which a literally magically accentuated atmosphere of the early evening sky plays a central role. In direct alignment with the axis of the ball and the cone (tent), a small airplane—a monoplane—appears in the sky, introducing another typical Lhoták pictorial “artifact proclaiming that we are here” (Ludvík Souček).

The presented work Evening represents a wholly personal and unique vision of landscape by Lhoták, in which the employed attributes both civilize the scene and imbue it with an undeniable sense of mystery.