Pravoslav Kotík (May 1, 1889 Slapce near Rakovník – January 14, 1970 Prague) is one of the best-known representatives of Czech social art and abstract art. An artist whose work was influenced by the development of European painting in the 20th century, and yet the result is a distinctive, clearly recognizable work.
Art historian Marcela Pánková considers Pravoslav Kotík to be a "very undisciplined artist" who showed "constant variability" in his work through his dispersion, detours in his work and a certain penchant for experimentation. His work and life thus show several creative upheavals, several periods of balancing, looking back and blending, developing and returning to individual themes. Several creative upheavals were essential for Kotík: beginnings in landscape painting, neoclassicism and social painting, the synthetic-cubist period of the mid-1920s, a return to Prague or a stay in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, which was reflected in a cycle inspired by the theme of recreation and especially his non-figurative period, beginning in the 1950s.
Pravoslav Kotík studied at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague under professors E. Dítě, K. V. Mašek and J. Schikaneder, none of whom had a significant influence on him. With regard to the family situation and the lack of support, immediately after finishing school (1912) he left for Podkrkonoší, where he worked in Trutnov, Nová Paka and later also in Mladá Boleslav as a teacher of modelling, drawing and descriptive art. Of course, this step in life required a certain cooling of contacts with the Prague environment and, in terms of artistic creation, also the necessity of dividing attention between work, which is a source of finance, and between artistic work. Despite the difficulty of the situation, when his attention had to be divided, Kotík in Trutnov reaches the synthesis and influence of Fauvism. After a short membership in Mánes, due to differences of opinion, which were not unusual at the time, he transferred to Umělecká beseda. There he meets many classmates. Kotík finds himself in Umělecká beseda at a time when the social branch is converging with landscape art. In 1924, together with other artists, they separated from Umělecká beseda as the Ho Ho Ko Ko Social Group. He visited Paris (1924 and 1937), then the Netherlands, England, Belgium, but also Yugoslavia. He liked to travel and saw in travel the possibility of broadening horizons. In 1939 he won a silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris, he stopped teaching and continued to paint only, from 1947 he was regularly included in foreign exhibitions and in 1965 he received the title of "meritorious artist".
The painting Nude in the Landscape falls into a kind of balancing period. In time, it follows the cycle in which Kotík devotes himself to recreation. At the end of the 1940s, Kotík painted several other paintings with the theme of lovers and the nude (namely the paintings Lovers behind the Village, Village Lovers, Nude in Green), yet this painting is somewhat unusual: The nude in cubized form is placed in a quite classically rendered hilly landscape, where the shapes of individual peaks are so realistic that they force us to try to determine their names. The intermingling of the real and abstracted world seemed to synthesize the individual themes of Kotík's work: love for the landscape, Fauvist influence and Cubist synthesis, as well as moments of leisure and a relaxed mood as in the cycle of recreation. In the painting Nude in the Landscape, several of these influences seem to have come together: by setting a single nude in a more or less classical landscape, Kotík seems to be looking back at the early stages of his work. It is quite significant that the painting is dated just before the non-figurative period, as if it were one of the balancing paintings after which it is possible to start a new stage: Everything that could be achieved was achieved, the continuity and coherence of the work was confirmed and it is necessary to move on.
Lucie Nováčková