After studying in Munich at the "Lehr und Versuchsanstalt fur Photographie", he opened his studio in Praha, inspiring generations of photographers.
Drtikol is almost obsessed by the female body, believing it as the genesis of the soul and the beauty.
His nudes, lyrical and dramatic at the same time, recapture the ideals of the candid creatures painted by John Everett Millais and other Pre-Raphaelites.
Eros and Thanatos are almost always present in his symbolic embodiment of his Salome figures.
He looked after very carefully and seriously about his photographic sets. Lighting and geometric forms like waves and circles are used as backgrounds and at the same time, are merged with the female bodies and play with them, aching for the purity of the lines and the beauty.
In his images the pictorialist and symbolist style make way for modern compositions closer to Cubism.
In the mid thirties, the human shapes started to not satisfy him anymore and his impetuous research of the perfection of the beauty, took Drtikol to a drastic decision.
He created himself female shapes with wood or cardborads, being inspired by his ideal of beauty, with very thin bodies, almost subtle and abstract.
In that period, his research of spirituality, let him approach painting, the meditation and the oriental religions, separating himself relentlessly from Photography.
Nude study
( I would have linked his work to Klimt and Art nouveau more than the pre-raphaelites though .(?.)..)
Together with the angelic pre-raphaelites figures, surely that much about Klimt and Art Noveau is true. There would be much more to write about him, as some characters that remind even the femmes fatales of the Art Deco, but as you rightly say, this was meant to be an essential reminder.
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