Painter Jaroslav Král (December 5, 1883 Malešov near Kutná Hora - March 22, 1942 Auschwitz, Poland) belongs to the most important personalities of our visual culture, especially Brno interwar painting. His parents came from Moravia, his father was an economic administrator and accounting expert, and thanks to his job, the family with five children moved often, eventually settling in southern Bohemia. Jaroslav first studied in the years 1897–1901 at the German real school in České Budějovice and already showed artistic talent there. After the summer of 1901, he successfully passed the entrance exams to the School of Applied Arts in Prague, department of figurative and ornamental drawing (prof. E. K. Liška, A. Hofbauer, J. Preisler). In the years 1904–1908 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts (special school of figure painting by Vojtěch Hynais). After its completion, he undertook study trips to Dresden and Munich and lived as a freelance painter alternately in Prague, Písek and on the family estate in Moravian Svolšín. Jaroslav Král was very quiet and introverted by nature. He never married, but maintained strong family ties throughout his life. In 1916, after the death of the father, the whole family moved to Brno. Here he first worked as a drawing teacher at the Brno State Gymnasium, later in the years 1921–1928 as an assistant at the Technical University there. He also earned extra money by drawing caricatures for Lidové noviny or painting commissioned portraits. In 1939, he obtained a position as an external drawing teacher at the School of Arts and Crafts in Brno, but he was already arrested by the Gestapo on March 29, 1941. For his resistance activities, he was imprisoned in Kounice dormitories, later in Mírov and in Vratislav. The family tried hard for his release, but Jaroslav Král was taken to Auschwitz after the trial, where he probably died in a gas chamber.
In addition to his artistic and pedagogical activities, he was also culturally and politically active, belonging to the faithful and selfless organizers of Brno's associational life. In 1919, he became a founding member of the Aleš Club of Visual Artists and in 1922 of the Group of Visual Artists in Brno. He participated in its exhibitions every year until 1939 and was also its first executive. In 1927, he was admitted to SVU Mánes, in 1929–1933 he was a member of the Brno Left Front, and in 1933–1938 he became a member and chairman of the Ars Art and Science Club in Brno. Between 1928–1938, he also collaborated with the Brno magazine Index, for example.
Jaroslav Král's work is characterized by a distinctive painting style with a strongly classicist character and a typical handwriting with a limited range of colors limited only to cooler tones. As one of the few Brno artists, he focused his early work on social themes based stylistically on Cubism and the constructive solution of the visual surface. The paintings were stripped of superfluous details and he depicted the figures only in simplified forms. The motif with which he expressed his strong social feelings were simple people in unspecified, abandoned landscapes. Since the mid-1920s, figural compositions have completely dominated the artist's work. Female figures and civilian portraits of girls became his central theme, and from the end of the 1920s he limited his work to still life painting in the spirit of Czech lyrical cubism.
The Toilette painting from the gallery's collections was created at a time when Jaroslav Král was dealing with the theme of women, especially the motif of bathing, which was very popular in the classics of French modernism. It is characterized by a calm chamber mood, gentle poetics and a tendency to geometrize and abstract in the form of simple form and color. As Marcela Macharáčková states in Král's monograph from 2014, the author here violates the principle of modeling shapes with color, which becomes independent of drawing and rendering of volumes.
Jana Bojanovská