A Course in Life

When Miloslav Moucha was leaving for the French exile in 1968, he was an outsider whose course both in life and art was not determined by his proffesors at the academy but the paintings of his favorite painters – Josef Šíma, in particular – and his spiritual leader, the philosopher Martin Jedlička. When he was coming back after more then twenty years, he was a succesful artist with a proffesorship and an integral and compact work which has been developing from the symbolic beginnings through ‘projects’ and ‘installations’, painting reduced to its basics (the ‘Points’ cycle) to the richly texturized compositions of the Cycle According to St. John. The 1990s have led him near to his beginnings, ie. classical landscape with symbolic undertones. Moucha’s exquisitely laid out monography supplemented by a great number of colour and black-and-white reproductions recaps this development. It is altogether an author’s book, from the general draw-up and graphic lay-out to the author’s text itself creating the main body of the book. Accordingly, the texts by art historians (P. Restany, J. Valoch etc.) are placed at the very end of the book.