VLADIMIR PUKL/Seascape&birds&windows/ORIGINAL WOOD ENGRAVING/1956
Specification
Continent: ##Europa #Czechoslowakia
Motiv: #Seaside with buildings&window
Artist’s Main Feature: #The Bohemian-born in a poor family the academic artist VLADIMIR PUKL (1896–1970) is seen to be the best representative of the generation of an artist whose creative power has been influenced by the traumatic experiences of WWI and the Great Depression. He opted unambiguously for realism. He strove from the start to express reality as he objectively saw it.
Subject: The seaside seems to arise in the time his artistic visit in Yugoslavia in the year 1936/37. It belongs to his predominated static motives which arose on the base of his impressions from fascinating nooks, and crannies.
Age: #1956
Medium: #original wood engraving
Location: #Czechoslovakia
Signature: Pencil signed by artist/in print is
Originality: Unique Handmade Original / signed in print and with the pencil
Size (in mm):
The overall size is ca. 150 x 110
The image size is ca. 140 x 90
Size (in inches):
The overall size is ca. 6 x 4,3
The image size is ca. 5,5 x 3,5
Condition:
Grading: Good
Corners: Good
Writing to back No
Writing to front: Signature in print/pencil signed by the author and named
Stains on front: No
Stains on back: No
Creases or bends: No
Tears: No
Pinholes: No
Artist#Engraver: VLADIMIR PUKL (1896–1970) is seen to be the most prominent representative of Czech graphic art of the academic level in the age after 1945. Born in a small and picturesque Czech village Dobromilice na Hané near city Brno in a big family as a third of eight children he lived a part of his childhood with his grandmother in Brno. Incontestable artistic creativity was markable in his school years but despite it, his parents sent him to study a technical profession in Brno after his graduating in the year 1914. But in the following year, he was called for the army in whose rows he has moved through Galicia (Eastern Europe) and South Tirol to the seaside of Adriatic. In the year 1917, he was wounded and spend a time to the end of the war in the hospital of the picturesque city Jevíčko, which is located above the Jevíčka River in a wide valley that cuts north-south through the highlands of the Central Moravian Carpathians. After WWI he managed to enter the wished Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague where his teacher war the academic painter Josefa Schusser (1864–1941). Due to poor financial reasons, he could not complete his study at this wished high school to continue furthermore the artistic training as an autodidact since 1919. In that year he fortunately married his wife Kama who accompanied him through all his life. It was in the year 1929 only where he managed to continue his academic education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he was accepted by Max Švabinský but graduated under prof. T. F. Simon whose disciple and later an assistant he was. After graduation, he taught a short time at the gymnasium in the provincial town Nymburk. From 1935 to 1939 and the closing of all universities by the German occupational power he was an assistant of Simon at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. In the period of WWII, he lived a hermit’s life in the mountainous forests of Moravian Wallachia on his farm named Kut. He taught here and his students often stayed with him. Since 1945 Pukl had been a professor of graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He is the author of the script Handbook of Plastic Anatomy for Artists. In 1958 he retired and finally settled in the small village Hošťálková. He died after a long illness at the University Hospital in Olomouc.
ART
The artistic work of Vladimir Pukl was seen to be influenced by the traditions of the Czech Baroque. The two artistic stays in Italy (1935–1938) and in his Yugoslavian visit (1936-1937) have enriched him with new impressions and experiences. First of all, he appears to be an innate painter with powerful feeling of colours which witnessed his expressive and bright wood engravings and etchings. In the later years of his life he was overwhelmed with an aspiration to express himself in colours and he devoted himself to oil painting. But his consciousness was firmly embedded in the minds and atmospheres of his time to interest in the social subjects and the position of human beings in life. Under his motives predominate the static ones which arose on the base of his impressions from journeys, architectures, hiding places for meditation, fascinating nooks, and crannies. Also in figural compositions, he prefers calm and idyllic moments. In graphics, he focused mainly on wood engravings and coloured etching, he also devoted himself to sculpture, mostly creating small sculptures from glazed fired clay.
His works were often exhibited at home in Prague in the regional cities and abroad p.e. in Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Warsaw, Athena, Helsinki. In the year 1934, he was awarded a prize of the International Print-Market Exhibition in Los Angeles and a Silver Medal in Paris in 1937.