At Sea

Immigrating from Czechoslovakia to New York in 1907, Jan Matulka quickly became a member of the American Modernist circles and often spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with his friend and fellow artist Stuart Davis. As The New York Times critic Ken Johnson writes, "At their best, Matulka's paintings have a warm, playful feeling. [His] harbor scenes present him at his most appealing...the paintings depict views of seaside houses and wharves, rocky shores, blue bays and chunky, toy-like boats. They are robustly painted in a style that looks like a marriage of folk art and Cubism. Matulka doesn't push abstraction here as far as did his friend Stuart Davis, with whom he spent time in Gloucester, Mass. The tightly packed compositions, patchy Cezannesque brushwork, Fauvist palette and blocky forms give the pictures a rich formal immediacy. But Matulka also conveys an enchanting sense of place. It's hard not to be charmed by this urbane modernist's fantasy of maritime rusticity." ("Art in Review; Jan Matulka," The New York Times, June 25, 1999, p. E31)