St Sebastian, 1912

St Sebastian is a painting of crucial importance in the work of Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918), a prominent artist of the pre-World War I Czech avant-garde. Unlike traditional renderings of the theme of suffering of St Sebastian, a Christian martyr and saint, Bohumil Kubišta combined here Cubist form and expressivity with spiritual content. This paramount achievement in Kubišta’s oeuvre tends to be i…