Jindřich Štyrský

Pierre Soulages

Jean-Paul Riopelle

Highlights

Pablo Picasso

Paris

Specialist, Contemporary Art

Joelle Koops

Associate Specialist, Contemporary Art

Armance Gay

Co Head of Department | Modern & Contemporary Art

Thomas Bompard

Aurélie Vandevoorde

Meet our Specialists

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The Paris Art Moderne et Contemporain Evening Sale brings together artworks created by some of the masters of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century. Among the highlights of the sale are very important works from Jindřich Štyrský, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages. The Art Moderne et Contemporain Evening Sale is a unique occasion to acquire rare masterworks by these artists.

Art Moderne et Contemporain Evening Auction 

Introduction by Mr Karel Srp If one painting from Czech interwar surrealism had to be named the most important, it would be The Trauma of Birth by Jindřich Štyrský. It resembles a school blackboard, on the black surface of which various very suggestively painted objects are placed, strongly reflecting the author's personal and dream experiences. Many of them are based on the critical state of health that Štyrský fell into during his stay in Paris in late June 1935, when, together with the poet Vítězslav Nezval and the painter Toyen, they visited their friends from the French surrealist group André Breton and Paul Eluard during the session of an international meeting of writers. Štyrský suffered a serious heart attack and remained in a Paris hospital. This personal near-death experience gave rise to a painting of outstanding power, now regarded as the quintessential Surrealist painting. It was during his Parisian residency from 1925 to 1929 that Štyrský absorbed the lessons of Surrealism alongside some of the movement’s greatest names. He embraced the very principles of Surrealism to such an extent that in 1934, together with Kareil Teige, Toyen and Vítězslav Nezval he founded the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group, of which the present painting became the paragon. Like all the Surrealists, Freud’s nascent notion of the subconscious and the influence of psychoanalysis are at the heart of Štyrský’s art, as evidence by this work in which objects seem to derive from subconscious or unconscious associations, and from which emanates an atmosphere reminiscent of a nightmare or strange dream. Yet the unity that emanates from this collection of disparate objects is in line with the theories of the greatest Surrealist artists: Magritte’s theory of elective affinities, in which the Belgian painter explores how the combination of two related objects can create a poetic dynamic just as intense as the combination of two completely incongruous objects; or Dali’s paranoiac-critical method, which seeks to stimulate imagination in order to access new associations of ideas and reveal hidden meanings through these unrelated elements. The name of the painting already refers to Otto Rank's book Das Trauma der Geburt (1925), which was well known among the Prague surrealists. Each of the depicted objects had a deep meaning for Štyrský, which had foreshadowing in his previous work, as well as influenced the author's subsequent work. The Trauma of Birth is an exceptional account of states between life and death. Vítězslav Nezval's commemorative book on the days in Paris in late June 1935, entitled Ulice Git-le Coeur (1936), hints at much to explain it. When it was exhibited for the first time at the members' exhibition of the Mánes Association of Visual Artists in the fall of 1936, where Jindřich Štyrský sent it as his only work, its title was: Birth Trauma (Table of objects that create a being-object that is an image in itself), which today narrows down to The Trauma of Birth. After its completion, the painting remained in Štyrský's possessions, he had it in his room, he saw it every day. After his death, it passed into the possession of Toyen, who exported it to Paris in 1947. She kept it all her life.