At the Water

Bathers by the water came to the young Czech modernists from Cézanne, who had used the subject to build figures and landscape out of the same solid blocks. In 1914 Václav Špála, then working in Prague in a Cubist manner, painted this small version. The body is broken into flat, angled planes of brick red and pink. Around it run broad strokes of deep blue, with paler blue in between, so the warm figure stands out sharply against a cool ground. The Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava owns a larger picture from the same year, Two Women by the Water, with a second figure added. Špála signed this one in the top corner, with a short 14 for the year. It comes from the Rotter collection in Vienna, which placed it in the Belvedere on permanent loan in 2012.