Jan Zrzavý applied several times to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague [Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze] but was rejected. Having been admitted to the School of Applied Arts, he was expelled after only a short time. He was therefore a self-taught artist and regarded Bohumil Kubišta as his teacher, as well as the painters of the Italian High Renaissance. Zrzavý was strongly opposed to modernism – like Kubišta, he rejected Picasso's
predecessor Paul Cézanne – and yet he saw himself as a modern painter. With his distinctive visual lyricism, he was one of the most prominent figures of the twentieth-century Czech avant-garde and is one of the most important representatives of Magical Realism.
In 1910 he joined the Sursum Association, from 1912 to 1917 and from 1919 to 1923 he was a member of the Mánes Association of Fine Artists in Prague, and in 1923 he joined the Umělecká beseda. In 1924 he visited France for the first time and made repeated visits up to 1939. Apart from Paris, he was particularly drawn to Brittany with its grey-brown rocky coast and cobalt-blue sea, which is where he also created many of his most famous paintings. By that time, he had already completed his metamorphosis into an Expressionist-Cubist artist, seeking to manifest the cohesion of natural forces, their harmony and tranquillity. In 1925, he exhibited 47 paintings at the gallery Der Sturm in Berlin, which were praised by the Prague-based German writer and cultural historian Johannes Urzidil.
His illustrations and stage scenery designs for the National Theatre in Prague gained widespread popularity, as did his paintings, which adorned the walls of Czech school buildings for decades. He was officially honoured as a National Artist in 1966, but he had long held this title informally because of his resonance within society.
The young Czechoslovak state in the period between the two world wars embraced the avant-garde forms of artistic expression in order to underscore its social and political orientation. In this connection, Jan Zrzavý, along with Josef Čapek, was one of the most important personalities in the field of the visual arts. His friend Jaroslav Seifert, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, said of Jan Zrzavý's work that it "brought a great message from the world towards which we were moving".
Jan Zrzavý succeeded in fulfilling the need of modern people to "express their otherwise carefully concealed sadness and joy, everything that is referred to as passion", as Bohumil Kubišta aptly remarked. Zrzavý expressed the former of these psychological states in his 1915 painting Hoře [Grief], which shows a lonely, sad face with a tear streaming down its glowing cheek. The paintings of Josef Bolf exude an equally sombre atmosphere.
GRIEF, 1915
b. 1890 in Okrouhlice, Kingdom of Bohemia
d. 1977 in Prague