Weeping Black Head (Head of the Heart, Weeping Muse)

Heraldry guided Rykr to the use of the most elementary elements of reality in an encoded mission similar to the function of symbols in historical coats of arms. In 1938, he painted the gouache Black Crying Heads and illustrated his wife’s collection of poems Kaladý or the Refuge of Speech. By his wife Milada Součková. A symbol of a head, analogous to the black head in our painting, appears in one of the illustrations. The entire concept of Rykr’s gouache is about the loss of land, the Sudetenland, which is symbolised by borderline forests and a single solitary house. The land, the Czech countryside, is a schematic crying black head in the shape of a heart, something between a phantom emerging above the landscape and a coat of arms of grievousness. In this gouache, Rykr proved his ability to create a modernistic allegory of intervention.