Still Life with Dress Form, Jan Matulka

Archive Label 1999: A major figure in the art world during the 1920s and 1930s, Jan Matulka maintained studios in New York and in Paris. He served as a bridge between European and American modernism, transmitting cubism and other forms of abstraction from the European avant-garde to younger American artists. Matulka created a series of still lifes composed of objects familiar to him, sometimes using the same objects over and over again in different arrangements, such as the dressmaker's dummy and lamp in Still Life with Dress Form. Here, Matulka isolates the dress form and lamp against simplified, flat shapes of earthy colors. Emphasizing these inanimate objects within an environment devoid of detail and anecdote and ambiguous in space and setting, Matulka calls attention to the lack of human presence and emotion in the scene, which was a common characteristic of American art of the time.