| Jan Matulka | ||
| Birth Date: November 7, 1890 |
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| Death Date: June 25, 1972 Artist Gallery |
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| Jan Matulka’s paintings, ranging from the traditional to the abstract, are a measure of the dynamism of American art during the 1920s and 1930s. Matulka is included among the best of the American modernists.
Born in Bohemia, Matulaka studied art for two years in Prague before coming to the United States with his parents in 1907. After immigrating to the States, he spent nine years studying at the National Academy of Design. Throughout his life, he traveled and studied from Prague to Paris to New York.
Unfortunately, he was possibly his own worst enemy. Matulka would spurn potential patrons and promoters with deliberate acts of rudeness. He failed to join key artist alliances of the times; in 1936 he refused to join the American Abstract Artist group because of a minor difference in aesthetic doctrine. A private person, Matulka’s temperament kept him from the exposure he deserved during his lifetime. Only after his death was he recognized in a major exhibition in 1980.
Matulka’s most memorable work is from the 1920s and early 1930s, when he effectively screened out his financial troubles and personal difficulties to indulge in pure play with rhythm, color and form. In his watercolors of that period, the promise of modern art seems boundless. No other artist in the country so confidently mastered the language of cubist arrangement, or produced such a hopeful assertion of the creative possibilities of modern art. His watercolors remain among the liveliest of our century.
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