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

Josef Gocar was the architect who designed the department store At the Black Mother of God, built in 1911-12, which still stands on Celetna Street in the heart of the Old Town. It fits in so well with its surroundings that it was with a start that this writer, having passed by several times, suddenly realized that it is a building of the 20th century which occupies the imposing corner site. Close study by Gocar and his colleagues of the Gothic and Baroque buildings of Bohemia gave their works a continuity with the past and with their immediate surroundings, even as these architects sought to exemplify in planar form the experience of modem life. The apartment block designed by Josef Chochol in 1913 and still standing at Neklan Street is a good example of the lively surface articulation the geometric style could achieve.

By 1922, however, the postwar search for a Czech national style had led to the triumph of decoration over form, exemplified in Janak's commercial and office building for the Italian insurer Riuniona Adriatica di Sicurta, which still stands on Jungmann Street. This extraordinary structure, combining influences from antiquity and from local peasant architecture in a heavy neo-Renaissance facade, was spotted by Le Corbusier, lecturing in Prague in 1925. Remarking on the resistance to modern architecture in France, he jibed, "In your country you have a similar experience, as I gather from the massive building of Assyrian character, which I notice across the street.

Czech Cubist furniture and ceramics also occasionally look like nothing ever seen before, suggesting at once an ancient past and a future that has not quite arrived. The elegant vitrine designed by Gocar in 1922, for example, part of a group including a desk and armchair, could be a product of Ettore Sottsass's Memphis workshop in 1980s Milan, while the bizarrely ornate armchair seems to have issued from some lost civilization. Hofman's coffee set of 1913 looks both very primitive and very modern; with creamy white planes and uncomfortable handles, it is both sophisticated and awkward. Practicality was not the aim. The designers' refusal to compromise their vision may have made almost impossible the job of the crafts-people who struggled to make the unbalanced furniture stand upright, but it lent the heavy, awkward, odd results an energy and power which still intrigue and inspire.

Examples of Czech Cubist design were seen for the first time outside Prague in 1914 at the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. There works by the Prague Artistic Workshops, set up in 1912 by Chochol, Gocar and Janak to "revive artistic industries," were displayed in the Austrian pavilion. In the same year, the SVU held the last of the four exhibitions it had organized between 1911 and 1914, a review of contemporary European art which, besides Picasso and Braque, also included Delaunay, the Section d'Or and Mondrian. The outbreak of war in 1914 brought the Group of Plastic Artists and its magazine to an end, though individual members continued to employ Cubist-influenced idioms well into the '20s.