Living with Cubism - exhibition of Czech art at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Washington D.C - Decorative Arts

Art in America, July, 1993 by Lynn MacRitchie

Those who consider themselves familiar with Cubism and its key role in 20th-century art may find a visit to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum this summer a revelation. "Czech Cubism: Architecture and Design" [through Aug. 151 offers a fascinating survey of architectural drawings, furniture, ceramics and metalwork which embody the Czech venture into Cubist applied art and design between 1910 and 1925. Only in Bohemia, as it was then called, did Cubism influence such an array of art forms and exercise so direct an impact on urban life.

The swift Czech adoption and transformation of the studio experiments of Picasso and Braque in painting owed much to the character of Prague as an artistic center in its own right. At the beginning of this century, when it was the capital of Bohemia, Prague lay at the cultural crossroads of Europe. Bohemian artists, designers and architects played a significant role in the development of Jugendstil, and Prague's flourishing cafe society provided a forum for lively artistic debate.

The leading artistic group was the Manes Association of Plastic Artists, founded in 1887, which published the magazine Volne smery (Free Directions). It was Manes which organized an influential series of modern art exhibitions in Prague: shows by Rodin in 1902, Munch in 1905, French Impressionists in 1907 and Emile Bernard in 1908. In February 1910, an exhibition of the Independents brought the work of Braque, Derain and Matisse, among others, to the city. A collection taken around the cafes raised enough to purchase Derain's painting Bathing from the exhibition. In 191 1, the younger artists whose attention had first been turned towards France by the Mines exhibitions split from their mentors, who did not share the growing enthusiasm for the Cubist experiment. A new group, Skupina Vytvarnych Umelcu (SVU), The Group of Plastic Artists, and a new magazine, Umelecky mesicnik (Artistic Monthly), were set up. Members of the SVU included the painters Emil Filla, Antonin Prochazka, Vincenc Benes, Varclav Spala and Josef Capek, the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, and the architects Josef Gocar, Pavel Janak, Josef Chochol and Vlastislav Hofman.

From their very first contact with the challenging new style, Czech artists grasped Cubism with confidence and swiftly turned it to their own artistic purposes. Artistic Monthly published Gleizes and Metzinger's "On Cubism" in translation shortly after its publication in Paris in 1912, and Prague collector Dr. Vincenc Kramar bought key works of Analytical Cubism. But Czech painters, who had eagerly taken up Cubism's formal innovations, remained true to the current of spiritual and humanistic inquiry which has played such a vital historical role in Czech work. Bohomil Kubista, Josef Capek (brother of the writer Karel and himself also a writer) and Filla, for example, all developed highly individual styles, using Cubist methods but creating with them a synthesis of form and content very different from the much more cerebral works of their Parisian counterparts.

Kubista, who had predicted in a letter from Paris to the painter Benes in 1910 that "Picasso and Braque are going to have a very strong influence," used the Cubist method as a device to strengthen an already powerful expressionist style. His subject matter remained traditional, continuing to include biblical subjects such as St. Sebastian (1912) and dramatic incidents such as The Murder (1912) along with the Cubist staples of still life and landscape. Capek made many studies of single figures, but rarely extended the simple planes and angles with which they are constructed to create the kind of spatial totality that was of such central concern to Cubism's founders. Filla remained the most faithful to the Cubist style as defined in Paris, following it through all its various phases. Perhaps most beautiful are his elegant watercolor still lifes painted in the Netherlands during the First World War. His later canvases explore the possibilities of collage and impasto, building up forms from an ever drier and thicker palette.

The most important link between these painters and the applied artists who are the focus of the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition was the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, who trained under Antoine Bourdelle in Paris in 1909-10. In a 1912 essay called "Plane and Space," Gutfreund contributed to the formal debate the idea that "the sculptor transposes a vision which is planar into space" and creates in the process a "geometric body as the residue of an abstract vision and real form." These phrases well describe his own sculpture and designs for objects, and link them to the work of the architects. Together, the artists and architects of Bohemia took the formal revolution begun in the studios of Picasso and Braque out into the world of things and the life of the people, making it part of their own central European search for a synthetic style, something which could unite all the arts in an expression of the human spirit.

It was Janak who wrote the key essay of 191 1, "The Prism and the Pyramid," which set out his theory of "privileged forms." These included the pyramid and the triangle, which he employed in sketches for architectural facades, monuments and interiors and in actual buildings such as the Fara house (1913) and in furniture such as a side chair of 1911-12. His essay "On Furniture and Other Things," published in Umelecky mesicnik in 1913, offers his thoughts on the affinities of Cubism--"the "style of our time"--and the triangle. Janak studied the architectural use of the triangle by Vitruvius, Palladio and Vasari and compared its use in the monuments of the Old Town of Prague, which "made out well."