Vaclav Vytlacil

American, 1892–1984

Vaclav Vytlacil was an American painter known for his distinctive figurative abstractions. Inspired both by Paul Cézanne and the teachings of Hans Hofmann, Vytlacil produced works which addressed both his motifs and the application of paint in its own terms. “No one in my former period of training had ever spoken of the properties of the two-dimensional plane, that planes built volumes, not lines, that volumes were three-dimensional and that the negative space in which they exist also has a three-dimensional volume,” he once said of his discussions with Hofmann. Born on November 1, 1892 in New York, NY to Czechoslovakian parents, he and his family moved to Chicago when Vytlacil was a child. The artist returned to New York at the age of 20, where he earned a scholarship to attend the Art Students League and studied under John Christen Johansen. Vytlacil went on to travel to Europe in the early 1920s, here he sought out the works of Old Masters such as Titian and Rembrandt. After returning to the United States, the artist began teaching at colleges across the country, eventually becoming a faculty member at the Art Students League, where some of his students included Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly. The artist died on January 5, 1984 in New York, NY. Today, Vytlacil’s works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among others.

Courtesy artnet

Still Life Composition with Bowl