Frantisek Drtikol
‘Woman in the Light’
Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
7.6.2012 - 15.7.2012
František Drtikol worked between the turn of the century and the mid-Thirties. His lyrical, evanescent nudes, use of non-light, shadows and evocations have inspired and conditioned generations of photographers up to our day.
Drtikol is fascinated by the female body and sees in it the origin of beauty, of thought, of the soul. He uses the female figure with artfully arranged forms and movements to express the sentimental pathos of expressions (which later disappeared in his work) and virtuoso composition. Woman becomes an obsessive vision, bearer of good and evil, saint and virgin, demon and femme fatale. His nudes may be divided into two groups: a lyrical set, and another much more dramatic set, though the two categories often overlap. His portraits of fragile, delicate woman recall Dante’s Beatrix, the angelic figures of the Pre-Raphaelites or the mysterious creatures of Gustav Klimt. Their expressions and gestures take us back to the dreamy, melancholic atmosphere of Art Nouveau. Alongside these languid, transparent figures he created his “femmes fatales”, symbols of love and death like those appearing in the works of many Symbolist and Art Nouveau artists.
The figure of Salomé particularly stimulated Drtikol’s imagination, just as it stimulated and inspired Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardley and Gustave Klimt. Drtikol’s photographs of the nude Salomé symbolise a time when lust and punishment, Eros and Thanatos, conflicts between sex and death culminated in Freud’s teachings and writings. The polarity of eroticism and death is represented in his unpublished photographs of crucified women.
© Galleria Carla Sozzani