Two faces of a world artist, two Venuses in one auction: Ladislav Sutnar, pioneer of graphic design and American pop art
Ladislav Sutnar's name is primarily associated with design in the Czech basin; whether with the high-quality wooden toys for children or the elegant tea and dining services he designed for the Beautiful Room in the 1930s. However, his pioneering work in the field of American pop art still awaits its true appreciation. Two monumental paintings from the Venus cycle will be auctioned on 28/05/2023 at the Kodl Gallery, an auction house that exactly twenty years ago organized the first ever sale exhibition in the Czech Republic focused specifically on the pop art works of this world-renowned artist.
Comprehensible, purposeful and socially positive design. This was the point of Sutnar's life's work. This method of analytical and at the same time practical thinking later found its way into his pioneering pop-art paintings, which he exhibited in 1969 under the term Joy-art, i.e. "the art of joy". In them, he developed his vision of design for the twentieth century, which was supposed to be intrinsically happy, humorous and vital.
Sutnar's Venuses are not just attractive poster paintings. They are the visual codes of their time. He was able to inscribe in them the mood of the 1960s in America, which, despite the persistent moral dogmas and puritanism, began to relax due to the influence of increasing mass communication. Sutnar noticed this social change at the beginning and faced it, as he did everything else in his life.
Already in the fifties, the series The Strip Street was created, inspired by the women he had previously met in the immediate vicinity of his own apartment. In the first years of his work in America, he took up residence in a building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues on 52nd Street, which had been a brothel during the war years. When he followed up the series with the Venus cycle in the 1960s, he was already an established artist in American culture, and the whole emerging generation of American artists met in his studio, such as Andy Warhol or Philip Pearlstein, who were completely alien to the prejudices of the previous traditionalist generation. The iconic series of pop art "sex symbols" were created in Sutnar's studio much earlier than the famous series of serigraphs by Andy Warhol with the theme of Marilyn Monroe (1962).
Both Venuses, which will be auctioned on the last Sunday of May as part of the 89th Galerie Kodl auction, are published in the 2011 catalog of Ivy Knobloch - American Venuses. The first of them is directly reproduced in the catalog and the second is present in the reproduced archive diary of the artist under no. 7 The fact that two large-format paintings from this cycle have come together at auction represents an unusual collecting opportunity for art lovers of the second half of the 20th century.
The Kodl Gallery has long been recognized on the world market for the appreciation of the importance of artists from the Czech Republic. And not only through the achieved auction results, but also through lending and donation activities. It mediates the lending of works by Czech artists for important world exhibitions and shows, the creation of which it also financially supports. It is no different for authors of the second half of the 20th century. She is responsible for, for example, the author's records of Béla Kolářová, Jan Kubíček or Theodor Pištěk, in whose exhibition in České Budějovice, which focused on placing the author's work in a world context, she also played a significant role. It is therefore not surprising that both Venuses appear in the auction catalog of the Kodl Gallery, which is also symbolically celebrating 20 years since the very first independent exhibition of Ladislav Sutnar's pop art works in the Czech Republic, which it organized in 2003.
