Provenance:The Artist, Paris.Acquired directly from the above in 1927-1928.Collection of Otakar Storch-Marien, Prague, Czech Republic.(Possibly) acquired directly from the above. Collection of Osvald Brazda, Brno, Czech Republic.Collection of Dr. Helena Bajáková, Brno, Czech Republic, by 1968.Moravská Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic, 1994.Exhibited:Prague, Aventinská Mansarda, Exhibition of New Paintings by Josef Šima, March 19 - April 20, 1928, no. 13.Prague, National Gallery, Wallenstein Riding School and Kinský Palace, Josef Šima: paintings and drawings, May-June 1968, pp. 40; 139, no. 19, illus. (also traveled to Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery, July-August 1968; Brno, Moravian Gallery, August-September 1968).Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Joseph Šima, November 7 - December 23, 1968, p. 10, no. 12, illus.Mladé Bukách, Czechoslovakia, The Grund Hotel, November 29 - 30, 2013 (organized by Galerie Zdeněk Sklenář, Prague).Literature:Karel Teige, "The Paintings of Josef Šíma," Joseph Sima (1891-1971), exh. cat., Bochum, 1974, p. 13.Marie-Hélène Popeland, La Peinture de Josef Sima ou le Sang des Astres, L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, 2008, p. 98.Étienne Cornevin, Joseph Sima : visions du monde retrouvé : aquarelles inédites et peintures, exh. cat., Paris, 2015, p. 41.Petr Ingerle, "Painter of Unity," Josef Šíma : The Road to the Le Grand Jeu, exh. cat., Brno, 2018, pp. 157-158; 164; 166-169 (also mentioned pp. 102-103), illus. p. 159.Lot Essay:Šíma is one of those painters, uncommon in our culture, who see the mysteriously grand, the cosmic. He discovers it not in the multiplicity or fullness of things, but in a few elements of narrow span, often a single chord … I do not know of another painter who has maintained with such purity and steadfastness this contemplative attitude which is more familiar through the poets than the painters. - Meyer Schapiro Europa, 1927, is a pivotal work in the career of Josef Šíma, one of the most prominent Czech painters of the twentieth century. Born in Jaroměř in 1891, Šíma trained under Symbolist painter Jan Preisler in Prague and spent his early career involved with Devětsil—the foremost Czech avant-garde movement—before moving to Paris in 1922. It was here that he met the leading artists and literates of the time, including Tristan Tzara, Le Corbusier, Piet Mondrian, Theo Van Doesburg, František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, and Amédée Ozenfant. Between 1925 and 1926, Šíma frequented surrealist circles and exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in the surrealist section.In 1927, Šíma co-founded Le Grand Jeu (The Grand Game) with his two friends, the poets Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal. Like their Surrealist peers, they philosophized and rigorously investigated the conditions of dreams, sleep, the unconscious, and memory. A main source of inspiration were moments of sudden enlightenment and exalted visions, which would allow the members to perceive the true dimension of the visible world. Their motto was "to turn everything and every moment into a question. Question everything, reject everything, and at the same time accept everything." Together, with Šíma in the position of artistic director, they produced exhibitions and a short-lived literary journal of the same name. An illustration of Europa itself appears in a cartoon by Adolf Hoffmesiter, which depicts one of the first meetings of Le Grand Jeu at Šíma’s Parisian studio. The cartoon depicts four members of the group, Roger Vailland, Artür Harfaux, Daumal, and Gilbert-Lecomte, while Šíma himself is only present in absentia: he is represented by this painting and his dog sits in the foreground.It is in Europa, 1927, that Šíma first achieved imaginative expression and approached surrealism, and it is one of the most famous of his entire series of works with the enigmatic theme of the "cosmic egg.” Prior to 1926-27, Šíma worked in a non-representational abstract manner while under the influence of Piet Mondrian. However, his painting style changed dramatically in the second half of the 1920s, when he met the French writer and devotee of Sigmund Freud, Pierre Jean Jouve. A likely result of this meeting was the artist’s utilization of symbols such as crystals, obelisks, trees, and eggs. He transformed his inner world—his childhood memories, dreams, and experiences—into an original artistic form on the boundary between Surrealism and Poetism.The present work shows two female torsos that appear to merge and are both surmounted by a giant egg. Together, they float in a dark void emblematic of the primordial universe. In her book, La Peinture de Josef Sima ou le sang des astres, Marie-Hélène Popeland posits that the egg in the artist’s oeuvre “symbolizes living, embryonic, and chaotic matter, the female, passive and unconscious element.” (Popeland, p. 98)The importance of Europa within the artist’s body of work was recognized from the beginning of its creation. Its first owner was the Prague publisher Otakar Storch-Marien, who visited Šíma in his Paris studio at the beginning of 1927 while searching for an artist to illustrate his publications. That same year, Storch-Marien founded the Aventinská Mansarda gallery, with the goal of building a publicly accessible gallery of Czech modern art. A solo exhibition of Šíma’s paintings was held there in March 1928, and among the paintings loaned was Europa. The Czech poet, writer, and critic Karel Teige, who was also a member of Devětsil, wrote in the exhibition catalogue about Europa that the headless torso could be compared to a Paleolithic sculpture and that “The monstrous, chimerical, mysterious, and bizarre forms of Šíma’s paintings are images of the negative of life: dreams…” In addition to being included in several later exhibitions, the painting was shown in Šíma’s major culminative exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 1968. Europa is a testament to the artist’s fierce exploration of painting, as he moved beyond the figurative to create something new: painting as an independent visual poem.