A Personal Remembrance from Tom McCormick about the show:

   In 1994 I was exhibiting in an art fair in San Francisco when a fellow named Barry McMullen strolled into my booth and asked if I knew of the artist Jan Matulka. Somewhat taken aback, (Matulka was not exactly a household name), I replied I did, but why was he asking? His brokerage firm, E.F. Hutton, represented a Matulka relative, Martha Van Loan, who owned the artist’s estate. Apparently, she was not happy with her current dealer in New York. Now, I didn’t know a ton about Matulka except he was a major Modernist figure in American art. You don’t have to call me twice for lunch so I said to Barry (my new best friend), please sit down and let’s chat. A year later he finally arranged for me to meet Mrs. Van Loan in Connecticut... and so began a thirty-year journey.

   Over these past three decades the Van Loan family has entrusted us to promote Matulka and I hope we have met the challenge, with numerous gallery exhibitions, both in Chicago and elsewhere. In 2004 we organized a museum exhibition with the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey: Jan Matulka – The Global Modernist. The exhibition of 60 paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints traveled for two years to six venues and we produced a major catalog with essays by Patterson Sims and Whitney Rugg. Additionally, we have published a number of other catalogs, often with the help of art historian Henry Adams, a most helpful Matulka booster writing extensively on the artist.

   A prodigious worker, Matulka left a large estate and even after all this time we are still blessed with a good number of A+ examples from the early years of the Modernist movement. Many of the works here have been languishing in our storage for years and I have wanted to organize a show like this for a long time.

A Note on the New Mexico Works

In 1917 Matulka finished his studies at the National Academy of Design on a high note, winning the $1500 Joseph Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. He wanted to use the windfall to visit Spain but passport issues kept him home so he went instead to New Mexico, which offered much the same landscape and primitive locales he sought in Spain. There, he received permission to visit and make live sketches at the Hopi Pueblo where he witnessed the Antelope Society’s annual Snake Dance, a sacred ceremony praying for rain. This resulted in many powerful works, both large (finished later in his studio) and 9 x 12 inch panels, painted on-site. The haunting and sometimes disturbing imagery of the Snake Clan dancers wielding live snakes and wearing their fantastic, Kachina inspired masks and costumes, continues to show up in his work over the next three decades.

Top image: Moulin Rouge 

Conté crayon on paper, 1921

15 x 12 inches