______1970-1979 JOB - ANOLD - TESTAMENT STORY

The biblical story of Job has been haunting Jiří Sozanský from the moment he joined the special class of the painter František Jiroudek at the Prague Arts Academy. The preparatory course in drawing and the evening classes devoted to the study of the nude and to modelling helped him master the human figure, its topical interpretation supported by his general attitude. Lectures in art history helped him discover and explore old art, which he found in the collections of the National Gallery in Prague and in the Prague Baroque. At the same time he admired the deeply human, yet purely painterly interpretation of both religious and profane motifs in the work of such masters as Caravaggio, Rembrandt or Goya. In the atmosphere of humiliation and despair during the normalization period the Old-Testament story could be seen as a parallel to a topical attitude to old age, suffering, solitude and pain. Thanks to their universally valid, highly sensitive humanist ethos the series of differentiated, yet interlinked cycles and triptychs should be seen as the focus of Sozanský’s art in the 1970s.