Man's Head

In 1913 Prague, then a provincial city of Austria-Hungary, was caught up in Cubism, in painting and also in buildings and furniture full of sharp, crystalline angles. Antonín Procházka belonged to the Group of Fine Artists, the association in the city that had taken up the new style. In this small head, half a metre tall, the face is cut into tilted planes of brown, grey and bone white. The nose is drawn only as a pink outline on a pale strip, and a patch of red flares at one edge. The art historian Vincenc Kramář, a collector of Picasso and Braque, observed that from 1913 on Procházka was after, above all, a sensuous material quality, and grainy, speckled passages sit beside the face. Since 2012 the painting has been in the Belvedere on permanent loan from the Rotter collection in Vienna.