Josef Šíma

Josef Sima was born on 18 March 1891 in Jaromer, in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now the Czech Republic. He is reported by a single source to have trained at the Prague School of Applied Arts from around 1909 before going on to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where his teacher was Jan Preisler.

He settled in Paris in the early 1920s and became closely associated with Surrealist circles, exhibiting in the Surrealist section of the Salon des Surindependants. He took French citizenship in 1926. In the late 1920s he became a founding painter connected to Le Grand Jeu, a short-lived but influential Paris-based group of poets and artists that shaped his mature, visionary approach to landscape and light. In 1936 his work was included in the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a sign of his standing within the international avant-garde of the period.

In his later career Sima moved toward large-scale, luminous abstract landscape painting, a mode that culminated in works such as Zeme (Earth), painted in 1960 and now recognized as one of his most important late paintings. He died in Paris on 24 July 1971.

Sima's inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art placed him within the core international narrative of early twentieth-century abstraction, alongside the leading names of the period. His association with Le Grand Jeu situates him at the meeting point of Surrealist painting and French poetry, a position that later scholarship has treated as central to understanding his visionary landscapes and his use of light.

The 2026 rediscovery of Europa renewed critical attention, with art historian Rea Michalova commenting on the painting's reappearance after nearly a century. Freeman's, the auction house handling the sale, introduced the work in its own materials as coming from "one of the most prominent Czech painters of the twentieth century," language that reflects a broader, long-standing critical consensus about his importance within Czech modernism.

Sima's current auction record is Zeme (Earth), a monumental 1960 painting that sold for CZK 60.48 million, reported as roughly EUR 2.5 million, at Galerie Kodl in Prague in November 2024 after an extended bidding contest. That price superseded the artist's previous auction record, Jour du royal bleu (Day of Royal Blue, 1968), which sold for EUR 806,400 at Christie's Paris on 7 June 2023.

More recently, Europa, a 1927 painting that had remained in a single private Philadelphia collection for decades, resurfaced and sold at Freeman's in New York on 29 April 2026 for USD 1,522,000. Reporting around that sale described it as the second-highest price on record for the artist, behind the 2024 Zeme result.

Sima's market is best understood as scarce rather than illiquid: a large share of his significant paintings are already held by museums or long-established private collections, so major works come to auction only occasionally, mostly through Czech auction houses such as Galerie Kodl and through Christie's and Freeman's internationally.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Sima and no active commercial gallery or estate representative; his work reaches the market almost entirely through auction houses, chiefly Galerie Kodl in Prague, together with occasional appearances at Christie's and Freeman's. That combination, thin transaction volume plus no gallery gatekeeper, means collectors should weigh provenance and independent scholarly authentication carefully, as happened with the 2026 Europa sale. Because so many of his major paintings sit permanently in institutions such as the National Gallery in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, any single strong auction result, including the 2024 Zeme record, should be read as a data point from a narrow, infrequent market rather than as a broad trend line.