Katherine Dreier was frantic. The opening of a one-person exhibition at The Art Center, her exhibition space in New York, had just begun. Attendees included some of the most notable names of the American avant-garde art world in 1926: Alexander Archipenko, James Daugherty, Louis Lozowick, Joseph Stella, and William and Marguerite Zorach, along with figures from the literary world such as Katherine Anne Porter, not to mention collectors with a real interest in the new art. A catalog had been prepared, ads and mailings had been done, the exhibition space was stylish, and the refreshments were those that only a well-to-do patron of the arts like Dreier could afford. There was only one problem: the artist wasn’t there.
Jan Matulka eventually strolled in, but the damage had been done. Perhaps a round of profuse apologies, including hair-raising tales of the perils which had unavoidably detained him, might have soothed the situation, but Matulka was not the kind to kowtow to a patron.
Dreier had been a very big fish in the small pond of American modernism for some years. A painter herself, she had exhibited in the now-famous Armory Show of 1913, where she saw Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Dreier soon befriended and became a patron of the French artist. With Duchamp, she founded the Société Anonyme, one of the most adventurous venues for American modernism at that time and one that today rates a mention in any history of early 20th century American painting. Dreier had exhibited Matulka’s work with the Société Anonyme in a group show in 1920.
Matulka had left the country shortly after that group show to spend almost three years in Paris, where his hobnobbing with Gertrude Stein and other luminaries of the avant-garde Parisian scene was interspersed with summer visits to his native Czechoslovakia. By the time of his return to the United States in 1923, Matulka was as conversant in modern European art movements as any artist in America, and he was just the sort of artist to whose career Dreier could have given a major boost.
After the embarrassment at Matulka’s 1926 opening, Dreier was still willing to include his work in an important exhibition of modern art that she was curating for the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but Matulka indulged in a string of tantrums over petty details, showing such ingratitude that she finally washed her hands of him. She included only two small watercolors by him in the show and omitted him entirely from the show’s catalog.
There are some people with a particular talent for shooting themselves in the foot, and Matulka’s penchant for such target practice definitely limited his career. Born in 1890 in what was to become Czechoslovakia, he immigrated to the New York at the age of 17. He had begun his art studies two years earlier in Prague, but now he enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he received serious training in the academic style. He won several prizes during the decade he was at the Academy and was soon working as a teaching assistant there. Travel grants allowed him to visit the American Southwest and to Florida. His success also allowed him and his wife to make their sojourn to France beginning in 1920. It was the first European trip he had made since immigrating.
Landscape with a House, a painting I have recently acquired for sale, is the result of that trip.
Matulka seldom dated his work, but this painting is dated 1922. Where was it done? We know that Matulka had visited the village of his birth, Tũri Pôle in what is now Slovakia, the previous summer, and it is possible that this work was based on his observations there, but it might also be any village from Slovakia to France. The style reflects the modernist European art that Matulka had observed in his travels. The multiple perspectives of the roof lines owe much to Cubism (particularly Léger), for example, but the vibrant colors and the agitated foliage seem to be to be influenced by German Expressionist works he had undoubtedly seen. There may also be a hint of Surrealism in the brooding atmosphere.
This is the kind of work that Matulka exhibited in his 1926 show, and it ought to have made him a major figure in the contemporary art scene, but the loss of Dreier’s patronage hurt him. In 1927 he began exhibiting at the Rehn Gallery, but Rehn’s clientele was more conservative than the people who attended Dreier’s shows. The times were changing as well, and the rise of American Scene painting was indicative of a turn in national taste to less adventurous art. Matulka found himself working in a more representational style.
He had never had the gift for courting the right curators and collectors, though, no matter what his style. He eventually got a job teaching at the Art Students League, where he was, by the accounts of such students as David Smith, Burgoyne Diller, and Irene Rice Pereira, a generous and encouraging teacher. When he lost that job, partly because of the opposition of more conservative faculty members, several of his students continued to study with him privately.
It was the Depression, and Matulka like many other artists joined the Federal Art Project under the administration of the WPA. He participated in a large abstract mural project for the Williamsburg Federal Housing Project, but his contribution has since been lost.
Matulka continued to shoot himself in the foot. He had become friends with Arshile Gorky and other young abstract artists but, characteristically, he helped them to found the American Abstract Artists in 1936 and then refused to join the group, depriving himself of a venue which helped many artistic careers. The Second World War was difficult on an art market already ravaged by the Depression, and Matulka had his last show of current work in 1944. He would continue to work in relative isolation for the next 20 years.
A 1965 exhibition at Kraushaar Gallery of old inventory from Rehn Gallery brought Matulka’s work to the public again, with Joseph Hirshhorn buying two watercolors. One of Matulka’s most famous students, David Smith, had a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1969, and the catalog credited Matulka as being the greatest artistic influence on Smith, bringing the older artist increased attention. In 1970 there was a show of his work at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery which was reviewed in the New York Times. But now Matulka was an old man who had ceased to paint. He died in 1972. A retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum five years later and traveled to two other museums.
Whether an artist possesses consummate social graces like John Singer Sargent, enabling him to gain powerful supporters with seemingly effortless ease, or whether he is his own worst enemy, like Matulka, in the end there remains only the work. Matulka’s work from the 1920’s can stand alongside the achievements of a whole host of American modernists of the period – Hartley, Weber, O’Keeffe, you name it – whose works have stood the test of time and become part of the canon of American art history. I would be happy to talk about placing this work in your collection.
