Josef Sima - Le ciel de pierre 1963, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm, signed and dated lower right: J. Sima 63, further verso signed, dated, and inscribed upper left: J. Sima 1963 Le ciel de pierre Provenance: - collection of Pierre and Séverine Lexert, Italy (purchased directly from the author) - private collection, Paris Exhibited: - Josef Sima – Paintings and Drawings, National Gallery in Prague, Wallenstein Riding Hall and Kinsky Palace (May – June 1968), Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava (July – August 1968), Moravian Gallery in Brno (August – September 1968), Exhibition prepared by Frantisek Smejkal in collaboration with Monique Faux and Jean Hugues (Jaromir Zemina was the commissioner of the exhibition) Publicated: - Josef Sima – Paintings and Drawings, published by the National Gallery in Prague and the Union of Czechoslovak Artists, 1968, reproduced as no. 151 (pictorial part of the book) - Frantisek Smejkal, Sima, published by Odeon Prague 1988, reproduced full-page on page 322 as no. 354 Expertise enclosed by the leading expert of Josef Sima’s work and co- author of his exhibition, Professor Jaromir Zemina (also participating in the famous exhibition of Josef Sima in 1968 at the National Gallery Prague, SNG Bratislava and MG Brno, where the painting Le ciel de pierre was exhibited), enclosed. Professor Jaromir Zemina remarked: “Sima painted it in his final creative period. After the end of World War II, when he hardly created any artistic work at all, he began to paint with difficulty in the 1950s, but during this decade he regained his former creativity and created works that not only formed the culmination of his development, but also completed it. With the paintings he made at that time - also thanks to private gallerists, such as Paul Facchetti, who began to sell and promote them - he was one of the most important representatives of post-war painting, working mostly non-figuratively, with a focus described by the terms Tachism, lyrical abstraction, expressive abstraction, gestural painting, and informel. However, Sima rarely worked in a truly non-figurative manner. He painted mainly imaginary landscapes, often non-figurative at first sight, which Frantisek Smejkal, the author of the major monograph on Sima published by Odeon in 1988, called mental landscapes. Most of the work being created in the artist’s milieu in France at the time was surpassed by the depth of Sima’s spiritual content: he has rightly been called "the greatest on the path of meditative painting" and been compared to Mark Rothko. The main theme of Sima's paintings at that time was light as the creator and unifier of the universe, an idea that had attracted and guided his thoughts since the 1920s. At that time, he created his most luminous, almost immaterial paintings, often almost monochromatic, but very subtly shaded; in this respect, the late cosmological pastels of Vaclav Bostik offer a Czech comparison. Sima painted these works using a complex technique in which he exploited the whiteness of the ground, which shines through a thin layer of paint, thus increasing the luminosity of the painting. He made line drawing part of it, depicting geometric shapes, most often irregular quadrangles, which are related to the idea of the earth and harmoniously contrast with the flowing colors. These paintings seem to pulsate and tremble, evoking a feeling of vibrating cosmic energy: the Stone Sky, which is similar in concept to the 1962 painting Earth – Light, for example, evokes, according to Frantisek Smejkal, "a feeling of summer heat". Both paintings are reproduced in color in his monograph on pages 319 and 322.” Further consulted with Dr Irena Zantovska Murray HonFRIBA, Professor Jaromir Zemina, Dr Jiri Machalicky and Vladimir Lekes.