- 8
Jindřich Štyrský
Description
- Jindřich Štyrský
- Untitled (from The Portable Cabinet) (Stěhovací kabinet)
- signed and dated Štyrský 1934 lower centre
- collage
- 38.7 by 25.7cm., 15¼ by 10in.
Provenance
Merrill C. Berman (by 2004)
Ubu Gallery, New York
Purchased from the above on 26 February 2004
Exhibited
Prague, S.V.U. Mánes, Jindřich Štyrský, 1946
New York, Ubu Gallery, Avant-Gardes: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, 2004
Houston, Cullen Collection, 2011, no. 74, illustrated in the catalogue
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, Drawing Surrealism, 2013
Literature
Condition
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
Catalogue Note
With an exquisite economy of means, the work is a particularly eloquent expression of what lay at the heart of Surrealism. Apparently random images, ranging from the utilitarian to the luxuriant, are so arranged by Štyrský into an image that combines the scatalogical with the sexual. At the bottom is a lavatory brush, linked at the top to a partially smoked cigar, by way of an elegant ebony cane. Clasped around the cigar are the 'lips' of a bottle brush. Štyrský's juxtaposition of high and low brow items that exhibit soft and hard textures transform everyday objects into a highly charged image of sensual power.
The images that evolved in Štyrský's series from The Portable Cabinet largely fall into two types: either concoctions of a few random items placed adjacent to each other in such a way as to imbue them with a new significance, presented on a plain background (as in the present work), or a single principle background image that Štyrský then mutated by adding contrasting images to subvert the meaning of the original scene (see lot 5). In Štyrský's development of the sparser concocted images, he re-used certain items, asparagus for example, or - as in the present work - the bottle brush, imbuing the elements with fetishistic meaning (fig. 1).
In the catalogue of The First Czech Surrealist Exhibition in Prague at S.V.U. Mánes in 1935, Vítězslav Nezval described the impact that Štyrský's collage series from The Portable Cabinet, had on him: 'I was very surprised when I saw the first pieces of The Portable Cabinet, as we called this cycle. I was surprised when I saw that artificial figure, which Štyrský constructed out of asparagus and a woman's old shoe, or the figure composed of a divan, and a head taken from an advertisement for a preparation for increasing a woman's bust size. I was surprised when I saw the fifty or so prints with a similar poetic meaning, which Štyrský made as if in a dream and which confirmed to me that it was possible to unite two visual elements, no matter how different, just as it was possible to unite two poetic images, no matter how different. I cannot help quoting Breton here, who says on a similar subject: "We shall be forced to admit, in fact that everything creates, and that the least object, to which no particular symbolic role is assigned, is able to represent anything. The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation that can exist between two objects taken at random..."' (Vítězslav Nezval quoted in Houston, Cullen Collection, p. 186).
For another collage by Štyrský from The Portable Cabinet, see lot 5.