Torso III

After Bedřich Stefan studied in Paris in 1925-1926, his sculpture shifted from early civility to avant-garde experiments in line with trends in contemporary European sculpture. On one hand, Bedřich Stefan employed the cubist form system, on the other, he moved toward the elementary organic form he had seen in Brancusi. The radical transformation of the nude resulted in the maximal reduction of the standing figure in his Torso III, whose plain tight form is reminiscent of archaic sculpture. In the first half of the 1930s, Stefan returned from the extreme abstraction of form to the classical figural type.