Koloman Sokol

Koloman Sokol ( born December 12, 1902 in Liptovsky Mikulas, county Liptau; † January 14, 2003 in Tucson, Arizona, United States) was a leading Slovak artists of the 20th century.

Life

Sokol attended from 1921 to 1924 the private school Eugene Kron in Košice and a year later the school Gustav Maly's in Bratislava. At the Academy of Fine Arts Prague he studied, among others 1925-1932 at Max Švabinský and Tavík František Šimon, following followed by a year's study in Paris with František Kupka. It joined several stays abroad, in his native country he was a member of the SCUG Hollar, an association of Czechoslovak graphic artist.

The Mexican Ministry of Culture and Education invited him in 1937 to teach at the School of Graphic Arts and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City. This activity practiced Sokol of four years, until he moved in 1942 to the U.S. and continued his teaching career in New York. For two years, he returned back to Bratislava in 1946 and taught at the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava and at the Comenius University in Bratislava. In 1948 he returned to the United States. He settled in Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia, down. Starting from the 60 years he lived retired from the world and developed at this time a special symbolic- mythological style. The last years he resided in Tucson, where he died at the age of 100 years.

Typical of the works Sokol was the powerful expressionist style that put people at the center and often took up social problems. Especially woodcuts were produced by him. Well-known works are, for example, Well konci mesta ( On the edge of town), Osúdená ( Sentenced ), Stary pltník ( The old rafters ), V ateliéri ( In the studio ), V uličke ( on the road) and Za cieľom ( to target).