Franta: Paintings and Works on Paper (English and French Edition)

Franta is an artist known for his striking canvas works that explore the relationship between different human beings. The artist employs his recognizable subjective approach that favors expression rather than representation to create striking images of human physics. His artworks have a unique ability to connect with the viewers thus leading them down the road of self-reflection and self-awareness. Though he's known for his early figurative and later disfiguration paintings, Franta is equally skillful in the media of sculpture while transferring his unique expressive aesthetic to the three-dimensional artworks. Today Franta's works hang in museums around the work - Guggenheim New York, Musée d'Art Modern Paris, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. And yet in many ways we are only now beginning to recognize and appreciate the significance of Franta. This study, the first monograph on his work, traces his development from the 1960s when he first arrived in France, a refugee from Czechoslovakia, up to his recent exhibitions in New York and Paris. Not content merely to "produce works of art", Franta searches, step-by-step, painting by painting, for human transcendence. In an evocative text, the renowned French poet and art historian Bernard Noël shows us the crucial difference between fashion and art. He guides us through the depths of Franta's paintings and helps us understand the artist. With this book we can now follow, for the first time, Franta's 30-year quest for harmony and wholeness in a world that has torn him apart. 109 illustrations, 50 in color. In French and English.