Mountain Landscape

The first and most original figure of Slovak surrealism — and a painter with a biography worthy of a novel: after studies in Prague, Düsseldorf, Berlin and at the Paris academies, he staged Slovakia's first surrealist exhibition in 1936 together with František Malý.

In emigration he joined the anti-fascist resistance in Paris by forging documents, for which France decorated him in 1947; back home, the communist regime imprisoned him in 1951 — yet even in prison he managed to paint forty-five pictures. He entered art history with his dreamlike imagery, scenes of the Slovak countryside and the Jewish Street cycle, an elegy for a vanished world; the watercolour Mountain Landscape in our collection shows his sensitive landscape register.