Untitled

Frantisek Drtikol’s training as a studio photographer, just after 1900, included three years at the Institute for Photography in Munich, where apprentices were schooled in Art Nouveau precepts as well as photographic technique. An aesthetic sensibility on the border between art and design marked his career, though this shifted in later years (as seen in this work) toward the angular patterns of Art Deco. Drtikol’s studio business in downtown Prague traded on his artistic cachet; he and his assistants made conventional portraits for the domestic market, while sending daring nude studies to amateur exhibitions around the globe. The artist’s melodramatic stagings of progressively leaner female models concentrate fears and fantasies surrounding the athletic “New Woman,” a media construction of the 1920s. His mix of figures and abstract props also marks an original contribution to the imagery of expressive dance, which became a craze throughout central Europe at this time.