Visiting the Dead

Jaroslav Panuška

Jaroslav Panuška - Visiting the Dead
The painter and illustrator Jaroslav Panuška was an exceptional figure among Prague artists especially in the second half of the 1890s. Panuška did not seek harmless ghosts and human features in them but rather depicted their devilishness, some quintessence of evil. His figures are gaunt, as if non-material, their limbs being covered with shrivelled skin. A dead mother returns to take her child along; a skeleton comes for his skull that dominates the still life of a desk. The dead revenge on the living for previous sins, their worlds interconnecting, ethical principles disappearing. Nonetheless, many paintings of Panuška also reveal his peculiar sense of humour and hyperbole; however, they are neither agreeable nor compassionate but rather derisory and ironising.
date:
measurements: height 95,5 cm
width 125 cm
in collections:
material: canvas
technique: oil
inscription:
inventory number: O 15140
gallery collection: Collection of 19th Century Art and Classical Modernism
licence: copyrighted work

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