Original signed woodcut print by Josef Bartuška of the Linie Group by Bartuška, Josef (1898-1963) - 1925

České Budějovice, 1925. Original woodcut print on thin laid paper, measuring 20.8 × 16.5 cm, plate size ca. 8 × 6 cm. Signed in pencil and with Bartuška's stamp to lower left. Very good. Original signed woodcut print by Josef Bartuška (1898-1963), the leading figure of the Linie Group, an avant-garde movement active in České Budějovice after 1931, which embraced cubist and other modernist tendencies in opposition to the dominant local school of traditional landscape painting and decorative arts. Bartuška was an extremely versatile artist, working in photography, graphic arts, painting and line drawings, as well as collages. He also worked as a poet, playwright and film script-writer, amateur film director, musician, critic and theoretician. Along with Karel Valter, Ada Novák, Emil Pitter, Miroslav Haller and others he published the group's eponymous journal, Linie from 1931 to 1938. As a graphic artist he was influenced by Toyen and Štyrský, as well as by the Cologne "Gruppe progressiver Künstler." In the second half of the 1930s he created numerous more political drawings and prints, often with reference to the war in Spain. He is known primarily for his photographic work, subject of a separate 1932 exhibition, while the rest of his extensive oeuvre remains unknown, especially outside the Czech Republic. For more on this under-appreciated group, and on Bartoška in particular, see Jaroslav Anděl's monograph, "Avantgarda o mnoha médiích: Josef Bartoška a skupina Linie, 1931-1939" (2004).