Theodor Pištěk (1932 - 2025)

Yacht Club in Prague–Podolí, 1957, oil on canvas, painting dimensions 60.5 × 80.5 cm, signed lower right Pištěk 57; on the reverse an artist’s signature T. Pištěk and an illegible inscription; original frame, overall dimensions including frame 78 × 98 cm.

Provenance: Originally acquired directly from the artist.

Expert report: PhDr. Rea Michalová, Ph.D.

From the report:
The assessed painting “Yacht Club in Prague–Podolí” is an original, visually compelling, and topographically valuable juvenile work by Theodor Pištěk, a respected painter, Academy Award–winning costume designer, and scenographer of the second half of the twentieth century, and one of the most prominent artistic representatives of the so-called “lost” generation, which experienced only brief moments of freedom in the Czech lands. Nevertheless, like other leading figures of the art scene, he was able—despite numerous obstacles—to develop his art, both in film costume design, through which he became known to the widest public, and in his independent work (focused on painting and installation), which by its quality was among the few in the Czech cultural context to align with the international proto-postmodern wave.
The assessed painting “Yacht Club in Prague–Podolí” can be regarded as a collector’s unique piece, a solitary and rare work that superbly documents the artist’s creative beginnings during his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Although it is a work from the years of the artist’s youth, Pištěk demonstrated a masterful ability to capture a civically toned urban motif through a form of non-descriptive realism, building on the finest traditions of Czech painting of the 1930s and 1940s. It recalls both the civilism of members of Group 42 and various positions of so-called “pure visuality.”
The scene depicting a view of the yacht club on the Vltava River—undoubtedly attractive to the artist for its unostentatious “constructiveness”—is crowned in the background by the centrally placed, majestic Vyšehrad fortress. The immediate rendering of what is seen is matched by a highly sensitive painterly approach that allows the lively painterly hand and noble color palette to resonate.
“Yacht Club in Prague–Podolí” is a work in which Theodor Pištěk demonstrated his genuine painterly qualities. These formed the essential foundation for the later hyperrealist visual language that made him famous in both Europe and North America.