Petr Wittlich

The Modern Image and its Figures

The painter Josef Šíma was a member of the legendary French group Le Grand Jeu from 1927 to 1932. In the 1960s, he revived its aesthetic through the concept of hyperbolic space, which enabled the creation of a force field within the image, from which new radiant geometric objects emerged. The source of these objects was the zero point at the geometric centre of the hyperbola, located in infinity. Šíma thus effectively inverted the traditional perspective. The emergence of these new objects then multifurcated into figures of pure symbols. This study traces Šíma’s imaginative work in his illustrations for Miroslav Holub’s book of verse Slabikář (Primer, 1965) and Richard Weiner’s prose work Hra doopravdy (The Game for Real, 1967), through which Šíma was able to present himself to the Czech public in the 1960s.

Author's email:

petr.wittlich@seznam.cz

DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.54759/ART-2025-0201

Full-text in the Digital Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences:
https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/uuid/uuid:00c95c53-65a3-4b9c-a8f7-309849f5aeb2_1

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