(1914-1915) Female Torso II.
Josef Čapek

Popis

Origin: Auction house Prague.
Other version: the same motif exists in the form of aquarelle Female Torso I, September 1914, aquarelle on paper.
 
Published:
P. Pečínková: Josef Čapek: Grafika, Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář, Praha 2009, č. KG 18

The highest achieved auction price on the world market for Čapek´s graphics: 13.125 £, Sotheby’s London, 2011
The highest achieved auction price on the Czech market for Čapek´s graphics: 780 thousand czk, Prague, 2019
The highest achieved auction price on the Czech market for Čapek´s oil on canvas is 17,5 million czk, Prague, 2016
The highest achieved auction price on the world market for Čapek´s oil on canvas is 556.250 £, Sotheby’s London, 2011
 
Female torsos belong to Čapek´s first attempts with the technique of linocut, which he, at the beginning, considered to be too rough and vigorous. The Author verifies here for himself what does this technique involve and only after a certain period self-confident graphics with distinctive handwriting of contrast spaces come to existence.
Female Torso II is from the collector´s point of view a very valuable piece. It reveals Author´s knowledgeability of cubism and mirrors also Čapek´s experience from the exhibition of El Greco in Spain. El Greco´s painting impressed him deeply by its elongated figures and by the play of light and shadows. The woman presented here – now without an expression – is no erotic nymph nor the devastated heroin of later days. She is the personification of a dream, she is a mystery and magic without a reality.
The ascription to Čapek is unambiguous – Čapek sent it to the respected German revue Der Sturm, directly to its publisher Herwarth Walden, whom he had met in person. Anyways, in the following years, Čapek was much more successful with his graphic work in Germany than in Bohemia. In Sturm, the world leading personalities of fine-art were being presented.
Both on the world and Czech fine-art markets, the Female Torso II is an absolute rarity. Individual prints do appear, nevertheless, sometimes these are only folios of the Sturm magazine, and they are without an exception not signed – just like the prints in state collections. This piece is signed by the Author right bottom under the margin of the printing – this means that it was meant to be the author´s folio.

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