Tag: Cubism

Artwork of the Month, September 2022: Sailor by Josef Čapek (1917)

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Exoticism. It is said that exoticism is not a Czech trait; that we cling to our country like dough to a hole. Certainly this is true; but have you gentlemen never read Robinson Crusoe, The Last of the Mohicans, and Jules Verne, and have you not lived in Bohemia, and had friends like that, and is it a coincidence that one of them joined the Comedians, another perished in America, and a third was lost in the world as a sailor?[1]

In the text Krakonošova Zahrada (The Giant Mountains’ garden), a description of his adventurous youth along the Úpa river in Northern Bohemia, Josef Čapek (1887–1945) cannot deny the provinciality of life in Czechoslovakia. The heroes in the books by Jules Verne (1828–1905) seemed much more thrilling, as well as the famous French novelist himself, who sailed the seas as an avid sailor. Unfortunately, Bohemia does not lie by the sea, a fact that only Shakespeare (1564–1616) could change in The Winter’s Tale (1609–1611). The play is set in Sicily, in a pastoral fantasy world called Bohemia, which lies by the sea.

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Marie Rakušanová a kolektiv, Bohumil Kubišta a Evropa

Beyond the single-artist study: Bohumil Kubišta and new ways of monographic research in the Czech Lands: Book review

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Is it still contemporary to write monographic studies on individual artists? And how would one do so in an engaging manner? These two questions frame the outset of an extensive artist study, whose outcome is Bohumil Kubišta a Evropa (Bohumil Kubišta and Europe). At almost seven hundred pages and weighing approximately four kilograms, the book is a heavyweight in every sense of the word – including the manner in which it seeks to challenge, refresh and extend research on the painter Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918).

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Kubišta – Filla

Kubišta – Filla: Book review

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Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918) and Emil Filla (1882–1953) were two prominent Czech painters of the early 20th century, whose work is the subject of the latest publication by Marie Rakušanová. The Czech-language volume Kubišta – Filla: Plzeňská disputace focuses on the relationship between the two main protagonists and their connections with other people that were friends or colleagues of the artists. This seemingly narrow focus, however, provides an opportunity for the author to examine in detail how radically the Czech art world changed during a relatively short period of time. The relationships that formed fast and dissolved even faster, the quickly established artistic groups with a diversity of aims and membership that never lasted long, prove how rapid the transformation was in the art and society of the time.

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Artwork of the Month, October 2020: Still Life with Liebknecht Print by István Dési Huber (c. 1930)

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For centuries, the still life was considered as the least prestigious of artistic genres, dismissed by critics as undemanding because it only depicted lifeless objects. Yet, there was always more to still lifes than what immediately meets the eye. Allowing unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated objects, they lent themselves to symbolic compositions; they were well suited for referencing the work of other artists or for creating commemorative images. Rather than just ‘copying’ nature, artists often used the genre to intellectually reflect on the possibility of ‘lifelike’ representation. From the late nineteenth century onwards the still life became a preferred genre for the formal experimentations of avant-garde artists. This article will explore a still life by the Hungarian artist István Dési Huber as an expression of his artistic credo. Enclosing works by two contemporary artists, Käthe Kollwitz and László Mészáros, into its pictorial world, Still Life with Liebknecht Print reflects Dési Huber’s views on artistic tradition, the autonomy of art, as well as the artist’s social role.

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A Reader in East-Central-European Modernism: Book Review

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In 1927 Kurt Tucholsky published a poem called Das Ideal (The Ideal),[1] in which he pieces together a fantastic wish list for his life including all the money in the world, an endless, but harmless stream of food and alcohol, and his desired apartment. The latter let him see the Alps in the backyard, and Berlin’s Friedrichstraße in the front, with tight-lipped servants, a rooftop tree garden, and 2 ponies, 4 stallions, 8 cars and a motorcycle in the barn. That is what the new Reader in East-Central-European Modernism 1918–1956 edited by Beáta Hock, Klara Kemp-Welch and Jonathan Owen and published online by the Courtauld Institute achieves: an easily accessible resource for an international audience that will serve as an essential point of reference for students and scholars of the field. Bringing together and translating 27 wide-ranging essays, written in Czech, Slovak, Polish or Hungarian, and not available in English before, is a great achievement. The publication was born out of a course on central European modern art and culture in the MA programme at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Whereas there were some anthologies of primary sources, which still could be expanded on in the future, there was simply not a sufficient quantity of secondary literature available for the student.[2] In contrast to the plethora of studies on German or Soviet art in the interwar period, there is still to this day a lack of easily accessible English articles on interwar Czech, Hungarian, or Polish art. This new reader makes good that lack, and the editors should be praised highly for their efforts; there are indeed many stallions in the stable.

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