JOSEF SUDEK, Room Abstraction, Prague, c. 1930s , 4.625x6.375", gelatin silver print, printed later. Stamped in blue ink on print verso: Foto Sudek, Praha III., Ujezd 20.; inscribed in pencil: PAA 7, 9.

Sudek could make a great picture of any subject. Here he uses modern furniture, flooring, and shadows to create a classic modernist still life.

Josef Sudek (1896-1976) is one of the great masters of European 20th century photography who brought to the medium Pictorial, Abstract, Surreal, and Dada elements that would profoundly influence American photography. At the same time, his diverse and unique vision evades categorization.

Josef Sudek was born in Kolin, just west of Prague. With the outbreak of World War I he went into the military and was sent to the Italian front where he was wounded. His right arm was amputated, and he spent the next three years recovering in a hospital. Despite being one-armed, Sudek determined to become a photographer and in 1922 began taking classes at the School of Graphic Arts in Prague. His photographs from this period reveal a fascination with abstraction for its own sake, influenced by the Bauhaus and Russian avant-garde movements.

For the rest of his life Sudek explored the rich play of shapes, textures and values in such ordinary objects as flowers, furniture, and glassware. He took endless pleasure setting up still-lifes in his studio window, drawing from his odd collection of possessions that ranged from the humble to the bizarre. He called these arrangements "simple still-lifes" and enjoyed the challenge of finding monumental beauty in mundane subjects.

Around the beginning of World War II Sudek became fascinated with making contact prints. From then on, he rarely made enlargements, feeling that contact prints were closest to his ideal of the photographic image. He loved photographing the neighborhoods, architecture, monuments and parks of his native Prague, and throughout his life the city was one of his favorite subjects. He photographed it in every season and weather, and at all times of the day. In a friend's garden he photographed sculptures, benches, and dew-sprinkled grass in a series called "A Walk in the Magic Garden."

Sudek's studio at Ujezd was a simple wooden structure in a courtyard sandwiched between two large apartment buildings. It was bordered on one side by a garden wall that is visible in many of the photographs he took from his studio window.

A shy and retiring person, Sudek never married. Nor did he attend his exhibition openings. Despite his humble circumstances, he managed to acquire a renowned record collection of classical music. Although his life was lived through two world wars and the Nazi occupation of Prague, Sudek's photographs capture something constant, whole, and even kindly, hidden in those corners of the world and in human nature where it is most often overlooked.

Very Good. Minor wear, silver mirroring near left and bottom margins.