A Landscape of Light by Joseph Sima

By 1967, Joseph Sima was known in Czechoslovakia, where he was born, and France, his adopted home. As the musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris planned a major retrospective of his work and he began writing his memoirs, the artist continued painting as a man at peace. In the second half of the 1960s, he was able to retrieve his early works in Prague, where he had been unable to return since the early 1950s after the establishment of communism in Czechoslovakia. Sima, who was shaken by the war and had interrupted his painting to join the French Resistance in 1940, needed to reinvent himself. Following the passing of Robert Gilbert-Lecomte in 1943 and René Daumal in 1944, the Grand Jeu companions with whom…