Bratislava, Košice, Mukachevo /1920-1924/ František Foltýn's studies at the School for the Applied Arts in Prague were interrupted by the First World War. After the war he decided to devote himself wholly to his painting. Initially he lived for a short time in Bratislava, before accepting in 1921 an invitation to go to Košice from Dr Josef Polák, the curator (from 1926, the director) of the Museum of East Slovakia. He had his first exhibition at the Museum of East Slovakia in February 1922. He maintained his contacts with artists in Brno; at the end of 1922 he was a co-founder of the Group of Visual Artists there. As well as landscapes Foltýn painted the figure; among the best of his early works are pictures of Raskolnikov and Dostoyevsky, which are similar in terms of their composition. Here Foltýn uses cubistic distortion as a means of performing a psychological analysis of his subjects. By this Foltýn was reacting against new trends of the first half of the twentieth century, which typically in Czech art were labelled as "civilism" or "magic realism" and were connected with a return in post-war European art to a tradition of greater realism. Paris / 1924-1934/ In 1924 František Foltýn settled in Paris, having visited the city briefly in the previous year. For his first four years in Paris he attended the private academies of art. Between 1924 and 1926 he took part in lectures given for Czech students by the painter František Kupka in his studio in Puteaux. Foltýn supplemented his income by supplying illustrations to the magazine L'Humanité and publications of the leftist publisher Bureau d'Éditions; he also cooperated with interior designer / architect Gabriel Guévrékian. Gradually he developed his own laws of biomorphic abstraction. His abstract pictures were first exhibited at the end of 1927 in the Au Sacre du printemps gallery, a meeting place for artists supported by patrons of abstract art Michel Seuphor and Paul Dermée. Out of these meetings was born the Cerclé et Carré movement, uniting artists whose principal interest was in geometric abstraction. In 1930 Foltýn had further exhibitions in Paris, the first of which, in the Quatre chemins gallery, had a catalogue foreword by the renowned art critic Jean Cassou; there was a later exhibition in the Bonaparte publishing house / gallery. By this time Foltýn, too, had become a member of Cerclé et Carré, taking part in its first and only international exhibition in Gallery 23 in Paris alongside figures such as Wassily Kandinsky, Hans Arp and Amédée Ozenfant. Cerclé et Carré then disbanded, and some of its members - Foltýn among them - joined the group Abstraction--Création art non figuratif, which was founded in 1931 and whose committee included, among other abstract artists of renown, František Kupka. Influence on Czech abstract art / 1929-1935/ Although František Foltýn was not among the instigators of the abstract in Paris, in the Czech lands his activities and his art were instrumental in the birth of its only grouping of abstract artists in the first half of the twentieth century; in its closing phase this group was known as Kvart [Quarto]. In 1930 the artists of this group took Foltýn's representation of biomorphic abstraction as a model as they addressed the autonomous relations of line, colour and space. The first exhibition in Czechoslovakia of the abstract art of František Foltýn was held at Brno's Museum of Industry in May 1935, supplemented with a number of pictures by Jiří Jelínek and Vojtěch Tittelbach bearing the influence of curvilinear Cubism and Foltýn's abstractionism.
Brno / 1937-1976/ In 1934 František Foltýn returned to Czechoslovakia. Having at first alternated his stays between Prague and Tábor, he settled in Brno in 1937. For some time he continued to produce abstract art; eventually, though, he returned to realist painting, re-engaging loosely with the genre to which he had applied himself at the beginning of the 1920s. The type of descriptive realism he chose testifies to his opportunism as a citizen of a state under German occupation, and it may also have been a reaction to his personal circumstances; having failed - on his return from France - to find in his homeland sufficient interest in abstract art, he no longer saw a reason to keep to his Paris programme. Foltýn saw the landscape as a space which was psychologically dark, a wartime space. Between 1945 and 1948 - in a brief abstract phase - Foltýn revisited his abstractionism of the 1920s and 1930s (much as the Parisian artists did), although this new work was informed by the visual experience of wartime, which he transformed into semi-abstract, organic figuration. Before long, however, Foltýn became subject to the communist dictates of descriptive realism, and he returned to the landscape. Although the pictures he produced at this time are highly sophisticated, very few of them do more than revisit an older, more conservative model. In none of these works does Foltýn condescend to opportunism: there are no works on the "constructionist" themes of so-called Socialist Realism. The ideological thaw of the 1960s brought with it a new interest in the art of the Czech avant-garde; for the first time, art critics expressed admiration for the contribution made to it by Foltýn's biomorphic abstraction. This new recognition spurred him on to revisit the abstract a final time, encouraging him in the search for new conceptions of form. This time Foltýn turned his gaze - in a late attempt to find a synthesis of Cubist and biomorphic principles - on the mutual opposition of colour and space (in particular where the one invades the other).
