Landscape Around Holice

Karel Malich began his artistic career at the close of World War II as Communism was taking hold of Czechoslovakia. Malich’s early work consisted primarily of landscape paintings depicting his native village of Holice and the surrounding Czech countryside. By the 1950s he had turned to abstraction but the titles of his works, such as this gouache and the other two in the Smart Museum’s collection (1981.254 and 1981.256), indicate his continued interest in the natural world around him.

The 1960s are known as the "Golden period" of post-war Czechoslovakian art, where leading Czech artists—inspired by pre-World War I modernist styles and contemporary abstract modes gaining popularity in Western Europe—worked in various abstract styles. Following the people’s uprising in 1968, culminating in the Prague Spring, the government cracked down of dissidents, resulting in less artistic freedom in Czechoslovakia. Authorities tightened their reigns on cultural production heralding an era of "Normalization," stagnating an otherwise dynamic modern art scene and pushing artists such as Malich onto the periphery of the Czech art world.