Josef Šíma

Šíma worked between 1891 and 1971 across painter, visual artist, illustrator, graphic artist and translator and 2 further recorded occupations. This article rests on 7 published texts and 4 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Josef Šíma studied at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague and Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. Training under Jan Preisler is recorded. The recorded working language is French. The field of work recorded is visual arts and literature. Places of work recorded in the authority are France and Brno. Work by Josef Šíma is recorded in the collections of Moravian Gallery in Brno, Belvedere, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Musée d'art moderne de Paris and Israel Museum.

• Name — Josef Šíma • Birth Name — Josef Jan Radim Šíma • Born — 19 March 1891 • Birthplace — Jaroměř, Kingdom of Bohemia, Austria-Hungary • Died — 24 July 1971 • Place of death — Paris, France • Resting Place — Cimetière parisien de Thiais • Field — * Painting • drawing • printmaking • book illustration • stained glass • stage design • Training — * Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague • Academy of Fine Arts, Prague • Movement — * Devětsil • Le Grand Jeu • Surrealism • Abstract art • Awards — Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1967)

Šíma was born at Jaroměř in the Kingdom of Bohemia on 19 March 1891. He came from a family involved in the visual arts. His grandfather was a sculptor and stonemason, while his father, also named Josef Šíma, taught drawing at a craft school and pursued an interest in ethnography. Šíma was the eldest of three sons. The family moved to Brno in 1904 when his father was appointed to the State Industrial School. After completing secondary school in 1909, Šíma studied for a year at the School of Applied Arts in Prague under Emanuel Dítě Jr. From 1910 to 1914 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where his teachers included Jan Preisler and Vlaho Bukovac. He also studied civil engineering at the Brno University of Technology between 1913 and 1915. His father hoped that the combination of artistic and technical education would prepare him to become a drawing teacher. Šíma retained a lifelong interest in mathematics, geometry, architecture, machinery and scientific invention. As a child and young man he read the scientific romances of Jules Verne, an enthusiasm he later shared with the actor and writer Jiří Voskovec.

Šíma's studies were interrupted when he was called into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. He served in Galicia, was wounded in the leg and, after recovering, was sent to the Italian front. Following the establishment of Czechoslovakia, he served briefly in the new Czechoslovak army and was posted to Slovakia in 1919. After returning to Brno, Šíma worked as an assistant in technical drawing at the university and established a studio in Žabovřesky. In 1919 he helped found the Aleš Club of Visual Artists in Brno with Jaroslav Král, Eduard Milén, František Süsser and others, and was elected its secretary. In 1920 he became a founding member of Devětsil, the Czech avant-garde association that brought together visual artists, writers, architects and theatre practitioners. His early circle included Karel Teige, Jaroslav Seifert, Jiří Voskovec, Adolf Hoffmeister and Jan Zrzavý. He exhibited with the Aleš club and was invited to show with the Tvrdošíjní group. One of his last theatrical projects before leaving Czechoslovakia was a stage design for Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. The paintings of this period were influenced by Czech social or civilist art. Small urban and industrial landscapes depicted railway bridges, factories, local trains, roads and districts of Brno. Works such as Automobile, Local Railway, Railway Bridge and Maloměřice Cement Works converted modern machinery and peripheral urban scenery into compact geometrical compositions.

Šíma left Czechoslovakia for France in 1920. He first worked as a designer of stained glass at the Mauméjean workshops in Hendaye, in the French Basque Country. The position was poorly paid, and he supplemented his income by writing illustrated articles for Czechoslovak periodicals. During this period he read the avant-garde review L'Esprit Nouveau and encountered the ideas of Purism. After approximately nine months in Hendaye, he moved to Paris in 1921. He initially intended to remain only briefly, but France became his permanent home. Through the artistic bookbinder Louise-Denise Germain, he obtained work designing endpapers and illustrations. Germain introduced him to Parisian artistic and literary circles, and in 1923 he married her daughter Nadine Germain. The couple later adopted a daughter, Aline. In Paris, Šíma encountered artists and writers associated with L'Esprit Nouveau, including Amédée Ozenfant, Albert Gleizes and Pierre Jeanneret, as well as the Dada writer and artist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. He worked as a draughtsman, illustrator and designer while painting views of ports, ships and the Seine. In 1925 he bought a house at Yèbles in the Brie region, whose landscape became an important source for his later imaginative paintings. Šíma acquired French citizenship in 1926. In France he generally exhibited and published under the unaccented form “Joseph Sima”.

Šíma's friendships with poets became central to his artistic life. One of the earliest and longest was with Pierre Jean Jouve. Their collaboration joined portraiture, landscape, book design and shared symbolic motifs, particularly the crystal, the storm, sacrifice and spiritual transformation. Šíma made a portrait for Jouve's Prière in 1924 and provided engravings or illustrations for works including: • Beau Regard (1927); • La Symphonie à Dieu (1930); • Kyrie (1938); • Le Paradis perdu (1938); • Langue (1952), to which André Masson and Balthus also contributed. His drawings and prints for Le Paradis perdu are considered among his principal achievements as a book illustrator. The National Gallery Prague later devoted an exhibition to this collaboration. Šíma's literary friendships also included Ribemont-Dessaignes, René Char, Jean Cassou, Léon Pierre-Quint, Jean Paulhan and writers connected with the Grand Jeu. His book work was not secondary to his painting: poetry supplied subjects, structures and analogies that reappeared throughout his visual work.

In the second half of the 1920s, Šíma met the young writers who were preparing the magazine later called Le Grand Jeu. The central figures were Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland, whose earlier circle, the Phrères Simplistes, had been formed in Reims with Robert Meyrat. The Czech poet Richard Weiner helped introduce the writers to Šíma. The expanded Paris group also included the poet and critic André Rolland de Renéville, the artists Maurice Henry and Artür Harfaux, Pierre Audard, André Delons, Monny de Boully, Hendrik Cramer and others. Šíma's studio in the Cour de Rohan became one of its regular meeting places. Three issues of Le Grand Jeu appeared between 1928 and 1930. Šíma served as its artistic director and supplied the cover design and visual material. His spiral design for the first issue became the group's emblem. Donna Roberts interprets the descending spiral as joining microcosm and macrocosm, the Grand Jeu's search for depersonalisation and its repeated imagery of descent towards an inner or metaphysical point. Šíma was not merely an illustrator of literary ideas devised by the poets. His paintings helped shape the group's understanding of perception, participation and the instability of individual form. The National Gallery Prague describes his involvement with the Grand Jeu as one of the decisive impulses in his work.

The Grand Jeu called its programme “experimental metaphysics”. Its members investigated dreams, trance, altered states, poetic experience, Hindu non-dualism, pre-Freudian psychology and forms of consciousness in which the separation between subject and object appeared to weaken. Their idea of “participation”, influenced partly by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, opposed the modern conception of isolated and self-contained objects and persons. Poetry, myth, dream and mystical experience were understood as modes in which apparently separate beings could participate in one another. Roberts argues that Šíma developed this philosophy most fully in visual form. His figures, rocks, clouds, trees and fields frequently appear to lose their weight, detach themselves from fixed locations and pass into one another. Forms remain visible but no longer possess entirely stable boundaries. This approach was related to, but distinct from, the contemporary Surrealist investigation of metamorphosis and the unconscious. The Grand Jeu's visual and literary programme combined modern psychology with a more idealist vocabulary of mystical participation, unity and the dissolution of the individual ego.

Šíma's cover for the first issue of Le Grand Jeu consisted of a large inward-turning spiral accompanied by the title and the names of contributors. Roberts compares its proportions with the golden section and relates its movement to the group's concern with descent, vertigo and the relation between the finite and infinite. The spiral also echoed Daumal's descriptions of altered states as circular or self-consuming forms of consciousness. It could be read simultaneously as an eye, labyrinth, vortex, shell, cosmic diagram and route towards an invisible centre. Šíma continued using spiral imagery after the magazine ceased publication. In 1969 he adapted the motif for a poster connected with an exhibition devoted to the Grand Jeu.

Between the late 1920s and early 1930s, Šíma painted approximately thirty portraits of friends and associates. Their pale faces often emerge from dark or indeterminate backgrounds. Sitters included Nadine Šíma, the photographer Berenice Abbott, Gilbert-Lecomte, Daumal, Hélène Povolozky and members of the Czech and French literary avant-gardes. Several portraits were based on photographs taken by Harfaux. The translation from photograph to painting nevertheless transformed the subjects: modelling, outlines and surrounding space were altered so that the sitter appeared less as a stable individual than as a presence emerging from or returning to darkness. In Šíma's 1929 portrait of Gilbert-Lecomte, the poet's face and upper body appear to dissolve beyond their own contours. Roberts reads the work as a visual equivalent of Gilbert-Lecomte's desired escape from fixed identity and his idea that personality was transitional rather than permanent. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims similarly describes Šíma's encounter with Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte as the event through which he deepened the metaphysical dimension of his work. The museum holds a major group of his paintings, drawings and stained-glass designs.

Šíma's Midi (1928), formerly known as Midi le Juste or Méridien, depicts a vertical white form rising through a landscape of fields, rocks, shrubs and blue cloud-like shapes. Rather than obeying ordinary gravity and perspective, the natural elements appear to float, separate and merge. Roberts interprets the painting as a visual formulation of the Grand Jeu's philosophy of participation: landscape is treated as a process of becoming rather than as a collection of stable forms. The painting is owned by the Centre Pompidou and has been deposited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims since 2006. A related work, Double paysage, tempête électrique (1928), combines two fields of landscape beneath a charged or disrupted sky. Its title refers to Šíma's childhood memory of ball lightning, an experience he repeatedly associated with revelation and the sudden transformation of visible reality.

Šíma met André Breton and Max Ernst in the mid-1920s and remained close to the broader Surrealist milieu. The Grand Jeu, however, was not a subordinate branch of Breton's organisation. It shared Surrealism's rejection of rationalist convention, interest in dreams and desire to transform life, while placing greater emphasis on metaphysics, initiation, Hindu philosophy and the deliberate overcoming of individual consciousness. Relations between the groups became openly hostile at the Bar du Château meeting of March 1929. Breton criticised the Grand Jeu's use of mystical and religious language and attempted to recruit several of its members individually. Šíma remained with the independent group until its dissolution in 1932. It is therefore more precise to describe Šíma as an artist working in close proximity to Surrealism, and later frequently exhibited within its history, rather than as a straightforward adherent of Bretonian Surrealism.

Šíma maintained extensive connections with the Czech avant-garde after becoming resident in France. He corresponded with Teige, Seifert, Voskovec, Hoffmeister and Zrzavý, met Czech artists visiting Paris and continued exhibiting in Czechoslovakia. He wrote reports on Parisian exhibitions and modern art for Czech periodicals including Lidové noviny, Život, Disk, Stavba, Bytová kultura, Rozpravy Aventina, Volné směry and Světozor. These articles made him one of the principal intermediaries through whom developments in French art were communicated to Czech readers. He joined the Brno branch of Devětsil in 1924 and became a member of Umělecká beseda in 1930. In 1932 he helped organise the international exhibition Poesie at the Mánes building in Prague. Šíma's position was reciprocal. He promoted Czech poetry and visual art in France while introducing French modernism to Czech audiences. His work combined rather than abandoned the traditions of both countries: Czech Poetism and landscape painting remained active within a Parisian practice shaped by Purism, abstraction, Symbolism, Surrealism and the Grand Jeu.

Following the dissolution of the Grand Jeu, Šíma continued painting imaginative landscapes, portraits and mythological compositions. Classical myths became increasingly important during the political crises of the 1930s. Works including The Return of Theseus (1933), The Fall of Icarus (1936) and The Despair of Orpheus reinterpreted myth without conventional archaeological settings. Isolated bodies, falling figures, labyrinths and barren spaces gave the ancient subjects contemporary psychological and political meanings. The Return of Theseus was purchased by the city of Prague in 1936 and later entered the collection of the Prague City Gallery. The work's labyrinthine and homecoming imagery also provided the title for a later collection of Šíma's writings on modern art. Šíma's 1930s work increasingly registered anxiety concerning the political future of Europe. Myth served less as escape from contemporary history than as a structure through which catastrophe, exile, sacrifice and return could be contemplated.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Šíma and his family moved to Treignac in the Corrèze department and later to a house near Nice. He participated in Resistance-related activity and lived under conditions in which his family was at times endangered. He painted relatively little during the war. The occupation of Czechoslovakia, the destruction affecting his French and Czech circles and the deaths of several members of the Grand Jeu weighed heavily upon him. After the Liberation, Šíma participated in the restoration of cultural relations between France and Czechoslovakia. In 1946 he organised or curated the exhibition Art tchécoslovaque 1938–1946 at the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris. He travelled in Slovakia after the war with the painter František Hudeček, seeking new material in its landscapes and folklore. These contacts diminished after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Iron Curtain.

Šíma resumed sustained painting around 1950 after a period of reduced activity. His post-war work gradually simplified its repertory of objects and figures. Landscape remained present, but it was increasingly constituted through translucent planes, veils, horizons and emanations of light. He participated in documenta 2 at Kassel in 1959. His work was also shown in major exhibitions of post-war abstraction, Czech modernism and Surrealism. In 1967 he was appointed a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, with the decoration presented under the authority of André Malraux. A major retrospective opened in 1968 at the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris and subsequently travelled to the National Gallery in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava.

During the 1960s, Šíma returned repeatedly to Reims to design stained-glass windows for the choir of the Church of Saint-Jacques. He worked with the Reims glass artist Charles Marq and the Atelier Simon-Marq. The project united several persistent elements of his art: geometry, coloured transparency, light as an active material and the transformation of an architectural interior. His preparatory designs use abstract flames, vertical forms and translucent fields rather than narrative scenes. The commission also brought Šíma's career into renewed contact with the city from which the founding writers of the Grand Jeu had emerged. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims now holds paintings, drawings and numerous studies related to the windows. Šíma suffered a heart attack while working on the project in 1969. Marq completed the remaining windows from his designs.

Šíma continued painting until shortly before his death in Paris on 24 July 1971, aged 80. He was buried in the Cimetière parisien de Thiais.

Šíma's early post-war paintings were influenced by the civilist tendency of Czech modernism. Railway tracks, bridges, factories, automobiles and suburban districts were organised into simplified planes and compressed perspectives. These works were not celebratory images of industrial progress in a narrowly Futurist sense. Machinery appeared within inhabited landscapes and was treated as one element in the structure and atmosphere of modern life. Even at this stage, Šíma was concerned with the relation between technical form and the larger environment. His French landscapes and harbour paintings of 1922–24 continued this approach. Ships, quays and the Seine were viewed from elevated perspectives that allowed the surface of the painting to function as a system of overlapping geometries.

During the later 1920s, Šíma moved away from strict geometric abstraction towards what has been called imaginative or visionary painting. The shift coincided with his friendship with Jouve and his participation in the Grand Jeu. His motifs—eggs, crystals, trees, rocks, eyes, torsos, clouds and lightning—were not organised into a fixed symbolic dictionary. Each could appear as object, body, landscape, memory or cosmic sign. They enabled the visible world to suggest realities that could not be directly represented. The National Gallery Prague describes Šíma's paintings as capturing an invisible realm beyond personal memory and disclosing archetypal layers of the unconscious. Objects and landscapes lose weight, levitate and communicate through the language of dreams. Šíma was interested in Eastern philosophy, Presocratic thought, myth and the unconscious. His work remained less concerned with the precise rendering of dream narratives than with the emergence of universal or primordial forms from within landscape and memory.

Šíma's portraits occupy an unusual position between likeness and visionary transformation. Facial features remain recognisable, but the sitter often appears suspended in an undefined space or penetrated by light and shadow. The portrait was therefore not simply a record of an individual's appearance. In the critical texts surrounding Figures humaines, Grand Jeu writers treated it as the place where self and non-self, body and surrounding space, finite form and infinite recession met. His portraits of Gilbert-Lecomte and Daumal became canonical images of the group. The former appears volatile and dissolving; the latter is more sharply constructed, resembling, in Thivolet's description, a cutting instrument or flint.

Mythological subjects became prominent during the 1930s. Šíma used the stories of Theseus, Icarus and Orpheus as frameworks for experiences of descent, danger, loss and return. The paintings avoid conventional narrative completeness. A fragment of a body, a single structure or an empty landscape may stand for the entire myth. In this respect the works retain the Grand Jeu's understanding of myth as an active form of participation rather than a literary story merely illustrated by the painter. The political atmosphere of the decade gave the myths an additional historical urgency. Falling, exile and the failed return from the underworld could evoke the instability of contemporary Europe without becoming direct allegory.

From the mid-1950s, light became the dominant subject and medium of Šíma's painting. Forms were reduced to thin horizons, translucent geometric fields, floating bodies and luminous vapours. Light was not represented as illumination falling upon pre-existing objects. It acted as a generative force from which objects and space appeared to emerge. The distinction between landscape and abstraction consequently became difficult to maintain. Works such as Composition (1961), Blue-Spotted Landscape (1964), Nuit-limite (1965) and Grey Landscape with Red Body (1967) combine the landscape structures, bodily fragments and geometric forms of earlier periods within increasingly transparent pictorial spaces. The stained glass at Saint-Jacques supplied an architectural counterpart to this late painting. Coloured light changed continually with the weather and time of day, making transformation rather than stable form the completed work.

• Stained-glass windows for the choir and chapels of the Church of Saint-Jacques, Reims (1960s), executed with Charles Marq

• 1925 — Retrospective of works from 1916–1925, Barvič and Novotný bookshop, Brno • 1925 — L'Art d'aujourd'hui: Exposition internationale des arts plastiques non imitatifs, Paris • 1927 — Works on paper, Galerie Joseph Billiet, Paris; Šíma's first solo Paris exhibition • 1928 — Drawings, Aventinská mansarda, Prague • 1929 — First Grand Jeu group exhibition, Galerie Bonaparte, Paris • 1929 — Solo exhibition, Galerie Povolozky, Paris • 1930 — Figures humaines / L'Énigme de la face, Galerie Povolozky, Paris • 1959 — documenta 2, Kassel • 1968 — Retrospective, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris; National Gallery Prague; Moravian Gallery, Brno; and Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava • 1979 — Joseph Sima, 1891–1971: Œuvre graphique et amitiés littéraires, Bibliothèque nationale, Paris • 1992 — Joseph Sima, 1891–1971: Le Grand Jeu, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris • 2014 — Josef Šíma: Paradise Lost, National Gallery Prague • 2018–2019 — Josef Šíma: The Road to Le Grand Jeu, Moravian Gallery, Brno, and National Gallery Prague • 2025–2026 — Josef Šíma: In-Between Worlds, Gallery of West Bohemia, Plzeň

Josef Šíma was born on 18 March 1891 in Jaroměř. Šíma held the nationality of France. Šíma was educated at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (1909–1910) and Academy of Fine Arts, Prague (1910–1914). Šíma studied under Jan Preisler. Recorded father: Josef Šíma. Šíma worked as painter, visual artist, illustrator and graphic artist, and the authority record catalogues a further 3 occupations under the same name, among them translator, draftsperson and journalist. Šíma worked in France and Brno. Šíma worked in French. Šíma is placed by the collections within Symbolism.

Šíma worked extensively as an illustrator, engraver and designer. A 1979 catalogue prepared by the Bibliothèque nationale identified seventy-three books containing his illustrations, approximately equally divided between Czech and French publications. His techniques included etching, lithography, wood engraving, drawing and hand-coloured printmaking. He also designed covers, endpapers and typographical arrangements. The literary collaborations were selective. Šíma generally worked with writers whose imagery or conception of poetry corresponded to his own. His illustrated books are therefore best understood as dialogues between visual and verbal forms rather than as decorative additions to completed texts.

• Automobile (c. 1920) • Local Railway (c. 1920) • Railway Bridge (c. 1920) • Nadine (1922) • Composition VII (c. 1925) • Europe (1927) • Midi (1928), Centre Pompidou; deposited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims • Double paysage, tempête électrique (1928), Centre Pompidou • Portrait of Berenice Abbott (1928) • Portrait of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1929), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims • Portrait of René Daumal (1929–1930), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims • Mlno (1929) • Portrait of Hélène Povolozky (1930) • The Return of Theseus (1933), Prague City Gallery • The Fall of Icarus (1936) • The Despair of Orpheus • Labyrinthe (1949) • Composition (1961), Centre Pompidou • Paysage à la tache bleue (1964) • Grey Landscape with Red Body (1967) • Rivière souterraine (1971)

• Pierre Jean Jouve, Prière (1924) • Jouve, Beau Regard (1927) • Jouve, La Symphonie à Dieu (1930) • Jouve, Kyrie (1938) • Jouve, Le Paradis perdu (1938) • Jouve, Langue (1952), with André Masson and Balthus • Paris, album of hand-coloured etchings accompanied by texts by French writers

Šíma exhibited with Harfaux, Henry and Mayo at the first Grand Jeu group exhibition, held at the Galerie Bonaparte in Paris in June 1929. Gilbert-Lecomte and Daumal supplied theoretical texts for the catalogue. His exhibition Figures humaines at the Galerie Povolozky in 1930 prompted a collective series of essays and tributes. Contributors included Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, Renéville, Pierre-Quint, Cassou, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Zdenko Reich, Audard, Henry and Delons. The texts were later reprinted in Cahiers du Sud. Marc Thivolet later called Šíma the Grand Jeu's “official” artist, meaning that his paintings provided the clearest public visual form for the group's ambitions. Thivolet contrasted him with Henry, whose drawings recorded its intimate and comic life, and Harfaux, whose photographs and photomontages supplied its visual chronicle.

Šíma is regarded as an important mediator between the Czech and French avant-gardes and as one of the principal visual artists associated with the Grand Jeu. His work resists a simple division between Czech and French art, figuration and abstraction, or Surrealism and Symbolism. Later scholarship has increasingly treated his Grand Jeu period as central rather than episodic. Roberts argues that his paintings gave the group's philosophy of participation its most developed visual form, while exhibitions in Brno and Prague have presented his encounter with its poets as a turning point in his career. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims possesses a major Šíma collection comprising sixty-seven paintings, drawings and stained-glass designs. His work is also represented in the Centre Pompidou, National Gallery Prague, Moravian Gallery, Prague City Gallery and other European collections. The asteroid 23437 Šíma was named in his honour.