Colorado & Regional Art

Pines

Pines

Year 1951

Artist Vaclav Vytlacil (1892–1984, American)

Media oil on board

Dimensions 26 x 38 inches

Born to Czechoslovakian parents in New York in 1892, Vaclav Vytlacil became one of the earliest American abstract painters. He played a prominent role in advocating for European Modernism in the United States during the 1930s and promoted American abstraction throughout his career. Vytlacil was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and taught at New York’s Art Students League starting in 1929. While he was affiliated with the Art Students League for 30 years, he also taught at Black Mountain College, Columbia University, Queens College and the Art Institute of Chicago. During the 1950s he taught for a time at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Vytlacil’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum on Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts. He died at the age of 91 in Sparkhill, New York. His family donated his Sparkhill house and studio to the Art Students League of New York in 1996, where the League established the Vytlacil School of Painting and Sculpture.

ON VIEW in Art Deco Gallery 6

Signature Signed ''Vaclav Vytlacil 1951'' lower right corner

Credit Line Collection Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art; Gift in Honor of Denver Artist Beverly Rosen

Accession Number 2015.0792