A Sensory Landscape Painted by Josef Sima: The Milan Plain
Making its auction debut, The Milan Plain is a late oil by the Franco-Czech painter, whose mental landscapes, born of sensory experiences, hark back to the early days of Surrealism and Le Grand Jeu review.
Estimate: €100,000/150,000
The canvas soon coming up for sale in Boulogne-Billancourt is a work from Sima’s last decade, a period when he was at his peak, marked by profound pictorial developments, with paintings composed of linear and geometric signs and transformed light-matter. Close to Surrealism in its early stages, Sima’s art evolved into imaginary landscapes, which between 1960 and 1965 explored variations of form in the same chromatic range, where light dissolved matter to reign alone on the surface. His work did away with all external references and no longer conveyed any message. The experience is solely poetic. Its expression was akin to Rothko‘s contemplative explorations: Sima’s paintings became mental landscapes, the result of an inner vision, where the contemplation of nature and the state of mind become one. When he arrived in Paris in 1921, the painter embraced the ideas of the review L’Esprit nouveau, directed by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. Their purist aesthetic inspired him to simplify his forms, without moving into abstraction. In the 1920s, his landscapes began to shift towards somewhat muted shades and synthetic representations where light played an increasingly important role. In The Milan Plain, he reduced forms to their most elementary geometry, suggesting an immaterial representation of the earth. Jean-Louis Chantreau (1908-1991), a printer in Nantes, bought the oil painting from the Argos Gallery in Nantes on the advice of his brother-in-law Jean Le Guillou (1909-1985), a shrewd connoisseur and collector. It has remained in his family to this day, and has never before gone to auction. From 1950 onwards, Sima further developed the work on light he had begun in the 1920s. This 1962 work features floating horizontal formations and levitating cloud-like quadrilaterals.
“I think that for painters, lightning, fire and light are elements they must never lose.”
The painting could illustrate his experience of lightning during a storm on a summer’s night between 1924 and 1925, when he was staying with Pierre Jean Jouve in Carona, near Lugano. He referred to it again much later, in a letter dated September 10, 1959 to his friend, the artist Jií Kolár (1914-2002): “I think that for painters, lightning, fire and light are elements they must never lose. […] the subject of my painting is light and the unity of all things. And the unity of all things is the unity of matter, of which light is the most subtle expression—light not as a mysterious fluid illuminating objects, but as a force constituting the existence of objects.” The central part of The Milan Plain could be this lightning, this white with its shifting, thick, translucent duality, which strikes when you least expect it. Sima never engaged in a spiritual quest for light, but in the sensory experiences lying at the root of all his work. Abandoning dark colors, he used lighter shades of ocher and sky blue, which enabled him to reveal the essence of light as a transcendental journey. After the war, he returned to the philosophy of Le Grand Jeu which held that 20 centuries of rationalism and science had killed innocence. He then turned his attention to the unconscious, archetypes, myths, Eastern philosophy and pre-Socratic ideas.
Sima’s Interpretation of Magic Realism
Sima came to a new understanding of the phenomenon of light, distancing himself from any reference to external concerns in a monistic conception of the world. Seeking new directions in his work, he materialized light, making it solid and crystalline: “I saw light as matter, and this confirmed my early intuitions. At first I painted landscapes lit up by this electrical storm, then, much later, light itself became the substance of my paintings.” Sima was one of the few Czech painters whose work significantly contributed to the history of art outside their own country. Born in 1891 in Jaromer, 100 km north of Prague, he was raised by a father who taught drawing and was highly involved in local cultural life. Josef spent a year at the capital’s Academy of Fine Arts. Here he was profoundly influenced by his teacher, Jan Preisler (1872-1918), founder in 1896 of the review Volné smëry (“Free Directions”), who was fascinated by Gauguin, and close to Mucha and the Symbolists. Sima played an active role in the Prague art scene, mingling with the avant-gardes and helping to found the Devtsil group on October 5, 1920, which among other things took up the magic realism theories of German art critic Franz Roh (1890-1965). The artist’s work during the interwar period provides a glimpse into his creative process. He processed the sensory perceptions arising from his poetic imagery and reflection, moving indefatigably from descriptive drawing to the purification of form. He transformed his inner world, childhood memories, dreams and experiences into a unique language at the meeting point of Surrealism and poetry. He succeeded in making the suprasensible world visible through the four guiding principles of symbolism, dissolution, geometrization and light. Light, identified as an absolute principle, became the sine qua non for any expression of the suprasensible.
ANTIQUE AND MODERN PAINTINGS, FURNITURE, ASIAN AND EUROPEAN OBJETS D’ART
Thursday 19 December 2024 – 14:00 (CET) – Live
23 bis, rue des Longs-Prés – 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt
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