# Modern and contemporary Czech art/Painting

I
PAINTING
By ANTONÍN MATĚJČEK
NO genuine art can ever flourish without a tradition. Yet it was just this tradition that was lacking in the early stages of modern Czech art. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Bohemia, a country that during the two preceding centuries had witnessed a rich expansion, a superb efflorescence of the Baroque style, was artistically in a state of deplorable barrenness. About the year 1800, the very nadir had been reached. The output had practically ceased: there were no longer any masters, commissions, or offers. Art had sunk to the level of a provincial dilettantism. The stray survivors of the great age no longer had the energy to do better. All interest in the history of art had faded, and such production as there was had become mere journeyman-work. Under Joseph II, the ancient guilds of Prague painters—the oldest dating from 1348—were dissolved, the treasures of Bohemian art were belittled, dispersed, or even destroyed in the course of the secularisations decreed by an Emperor with a passion for reform. The scanty remnants of Rudolph II’s famous collections were disposed of by auction under conditions to which the whole history of art affords no parallel.
This state of things could not fail to produce a reaction, somewhat similar to that which brought about the renascence of the Czech language and literature. But while the revival of ​language and letters came to be a matter of national concern, the efforts put forth in the sphere of art were of interest only to a narrow circle of amateurs, recruited for the most part from the aristocracy. In 1796, these amateurs founded at Prague the Patriotic Society of Art Patrons. The Society set itself to make Bohemia forget the loss of her treasures by organising a picture-gallery, and to replace the former apprenticeship in the studios of masters by a regular scholastic training, through the foundation of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1800. But as these efforts were not rooted in the depths of the national soul, they awakened no echo in the public at large and met with no striking success. Accordingly, during the first half of the nineteenth century, art in Bohemia was connected with the national life by a remarkably slender thread.
As for the Academy, the part that it played in the history of Czech art was a somewhat inglorious one, so mediocre were its directors and so autocratic was their sway. The first of them, Joseph Bergler, a disciple of Mengs, had reduced the great problems of painting to a tawdry method of design. To think that Prague knew no other classicism than that of Bergler, and that the greatness of a David, the beauty and purity of contemporary French art were entirely outside its ken! The results of Bergler’s teaching were altogether disastrous. His pupils turned out brainless designs, void of expression and utterly lacking in beauty. From time to time it fell to their lot to paint some altarpiece for a church dismantled by Joseph II, but the colouring is dingy and the draughtsmanship commonplace. The more capable soon deserted Bergler, and sought a new direction for their talent.
The new direction came with that powerful intellectual and spiritual movement known as Romanticism. At Prague itself the tide of Romanticism was beginning to sweep through the ​whole realm of thought and emotion, and the lofty ideas of race and nationality, which had already provoked fiery outbursts in Czech literature, were gradually finding expression in the arts as well.
But the Romantic Art of Bohemia went to German sources for its inspiration, and the artists were Czech in little more than in name. This timorous Romanticism was obviously unaffected by the seething maelstrom from which French Romantic art had sprung, overturning the old idols and renovating technical processes from top to bottom. Unadventurous to the core, our Romantics continued to model themselves upon the outworn Classicism of the schools, and their patriotic zeal is betrayed not so much in the form as in the choice of subjects drawn from the national history. Moreover, the religious motif takes pride of place, in Bohemia as in Germany. It is to Rome, therefore, that men go to seek salvation for humanity and, for art, consecration by the Church. The monastic school of San Isidoro, the influence of Overbeck and Cornelius lie behind the efforts of these Romantics, and the quattrocento sheds its rays before them as an ideal to be pursued. The new director of the Prague Academy, the devout František Kadlík, invested these tendencies with the Official seal of his authority. Nevertheless, by virtue of his feeling for Nature and of a certain freshness in his brushwork he stands apart from these theologians, remote as they are from the living world and absorbed in their dreams, to which they are ever striving to give form in line-drawings timidly eked out with a little arid colouring.
Yet Prague, despite its isolation, gradually saw the belt of its fortifications lapped by faint ripples from the great revolutionary wave that had started from Paris. Thus even in Prague men learnt that Romanticism stood for a rehabilitation of colour, deprived of its rights since the Baroque period, and at the same ​time for a truer vision of Nature and of life. The need of a new artistic dictator for Bohemia was felt, and the painter Christian Ruben was summoned from Düsseldorf. But this German, devoid of that keen sense of life and nature which marks the true Romantics, was not the man to endow Prague with a living art. Still, by confronting his pupils with genuine models, he taught them to appreciate realism of detail, and were it not for the false sentiment and insufferable theatricality of his paintings, we might perhaps here and there admire certain portions of his work, which show careful study and soundness of execution. Moreover, from Ruben’s school there issued the first generation that had any national consciousness, the one that laid the foundations of the Czech art of to-day.
Until about the middle of the century, plastic art in Bohemia was only Czech in as far as the subjects were taken from the glorious past of the Czech country. The subjects from Czech history especially, formed the programme for the painting of the period, and the period was such that the German painters themselves preferred to draw from the same source of inspiration. The disciples of Ruben—at least those who remained faithful to his age—did not contribute to the enrichment of Czech art. Historic Romanticism was for a long time to thwart the development of the painting of that period. Yet one must say in favour of Romanticism that it produced, towards the year 1850, an artist who, by the greatness of his talent, succeeded in rising above the level of the times. This was Josef Mánes, who has since become one of the pillars of true Czech and true modern art.
Even from an artistic point of view, 1848—the year of revolutions—accelerated the evolutionary process. Once more, but for the last time, Czech and German artists met as comrades, on the barricades.
​After this, the old territorial patriotism vanished, even among the artists in whom it had survived, uniting Czechs and Germans for joint undertakings, and henceforth the two nationalities were to evolve separately, along different paths and towards different goals. Accordingly, Czechoslovak art was born in the years immediately following 1848; painting discovered its true ideal, sculpture and architecture cast off their slough of decadence and rendered vigorous aid to the development of the regenerate Czech nation.
But the programme of independent Czech art was as yet a mere skeleton, and had to be clothed with flesh and blood. Ruben’s pupils were unequal to the task, with the exception of one man of genius, who soon contrived to shake off the master’s influence, even opposed his teaching, and went straight for his goal, swerving far aside from the academic path.
It would have been difficult, however, even for a Josef Mánes, to create a national art, had there not existed in Bohemia, from the very outset, by the side of the School and even in antagonism to it, a tradition which, although unrecognised and almost dormant, nevertheless linked the present with the mighty past. In contrast to the abstract idealism of the Academy, this tradition clung to the principles of the robust and exuberant Baroque style of painting. Some minor masters, landscape and portrait painters, had retained a feeling for Nature and a predilection for rich colour. Among them the landscape painter, Antonín Mánes, father of the great Josef, stands pre-eminent. He taught landscape painting at the Academy at a time when this branch of painting was not rated at its proper worth. Thus he could not vie with his colleagues of the School, the lovers of sacred and historical themes, addicted as he was to homely outdoor scenes, and never elevating his simple and sincere art to the pompous grandeur of the idealised classical landscape. More than any of his contemporaries he was ​interested in the play of light and in differences of atmosphere, andalthough his courage often failed him where he had to pass from the preliminary draught to the final canvas, Antonín Mánes relieved with a momentary radiance the depressing gloom that shrouds the first half of the nineteenth century.
The painter, Josef Navrátil, through his origins and his temperament alike, belongs to this period and this tradition, although his creative work did not reach full maturity until after 1848. He too was at heart a passionate realist with a preference for the informal and unconventional, and it was only circumstances that compelled him to paint great mural decorations with historical subjects in accordance with the rules of academic Romanticism. But even here, where other artists of his day were content to produce frigid and pretentious cartoons, purely mechanical in workmanship, he succeeded in conveying touches of poetry and picturesque charm, uniting Baroque sumptuousness with Romantic inspiration. There was a regular craze to possess his innumerable little landscapes of a somewhat laboured prettiness, but the works of this born painter (done in gouache) that find most favour to-day are his recently discovered sketches in oils, fresh studies of real life, the spontaneous fruit of direct observation, racy impressions of the picturesque in common things, seized with a bold, alert and vigorous brush. Without founding a school, Josef Navrátil, together with Antonín Mánes, paved the way for modern landscape painting in Bohemia.
A third painter completes this group: the portraitist Antonín Machek. He too has in him an element of realism, and in his portraits of solid citizens and their wives keeps close to reality, never flattering his subjects; but he also shows a trace of that stiffness and frigidity that characterised the art of the first half of the century. His faces, however, are well studied and his heads are modelled with vigour.
​These three painters, together with a fourth, Antonin Dvořák, who executed little genre pictures in the manner of the Viennese painter Waldmüller, are probably the only ones, before 1848, who will escape oblivion and who may claim any position of importance in the history of modern Czech art.
In that history, as we have already suggested, the year of revolution, 1848, is a turning-point. At this date, or shortly after it, we see the emergence of painters destined to play a decisive part in the evolution of Czech art. Moreover, the whole environment amid which artists moved was now radically changed. The aristocracy, as patron of the arts, had to give place to the wealthy middle class, henceforth won over to the nationalist idea. Art came to exercise more influence, and social conditions for the artist improved. The nationalist idea was in full swing throughout every domain of intellectual life. In short, the stage was set for the appearance of a powerful personality, firmly resolved to dispel all the doubts and hesitations that hampered Czech art, revealing new sources of poetic inspiration, bringing art once more into touch with the race and the nation, and furnishing to those who came after him a potent example of artistic courage and sincerity. The hour had struck for the great Josef Mánes to make his bow to the public.
He had of course to pass through the inevitable phase of German Romanticism as practised by the Prague School, but the family traditions he had inherited as the son and nephew of painters were of a character that led him soon to break with the director of the Academy, Christian Ruben. He went to Munich, where he conceived an admiration for Cornelius, Genelli and Schwind. He painted there a large picture representing Petrarch and Laura; the drawing shows great purity of outline, the lineation is harmonious, and at the same time the work betrays a profound sense of colour. It was a time when the ideas of race ​and nationality were spreading through Europe like wildfire, and Mánes was able to witness patriotic demonstrations in the German city where he was living. The scales fell from his eyes, and he was suddenly inspired with a keen sense of his obligations towards his own country, his own people. Returning to Prague, he took part in the manifestoes of 1848, but he soon had to leave for the town of Kroměříž in Moravia, where he painted portraits of the Czech deputies in the Legislative Assembly. This was nothing short of a revelation for him; Moravia, the land of an unspoiled popular tradition, amazed and enchanted him with the beauty of its types, the picturesqueness of its costumes and its general Arcadian atmosphere. He fell in love with this country, and was to come back to it faithfully later on, as an intellectual to whom the robust physical health and happy moral balance of the Moravian peasant made an irresistible appeal. More than once he went through Moravia from end to end, and passed on into Silesia, even into Slovakia, observing and taking notes, sketching faces, attitudes and scenes. On his return, he made use of these brief notes for the execution of works in which he now celebrated the placid, slow-moving yet laborious life of the countryside, now lent a new dignity to his peasant as an Old Slavonic hero in scenes of love or war. He was the first modern Czech artist to seek the well-springs of emotion in immediate reality, to counter the lifeless convention of his day with an ardent, almost religious fidelity to man and Nature, to substitute the creative impulse for the arid labour of academic permutations and combinations. He is our first painter-poet. His genius was universal. Besides his decorative compositions, he has left us landscapes delightful in their colour-scheme, portraits that show deep insight, illustrations now of a high dramatic and tragic power, now exquisitely playful, innumerable drawings of a rare beauty in line and modelling. In order to realise the suppleness and versatility of ​his genius, one has only to look at the fine portraits of Mesdames Václavík and Vendulák, the superb bust of his “Josephine,” whose enigmatic, sensual smile conjures up the fateful chain that linked her with the painter’s life, or the beautiful nude of his “Morning,” lovingly interpreted by a poet’s brush.
Mánes introduced into Czech art the sound tradition which his predecessors had not been strong enough to enforce upon their age. He thus endows the national art with. that “beauty of form” which France had received as a magnificent heritage at the hands of a David and an Ingres. Mánes’ line is firm, sweeping and expressive, his contours are supple, drawing is for him what it was for Ingres, the inner form itself, the modelling. Colour serves to set forth fully what the line has only hinted at. His colouring is rich and vivid, though still nothing more than a local tone, eminently plastic. Such a little picture as “The Red Parasol” is a sheer marvel, executed as it is with a sure and even daring hand, the work of a colourist who does not flinch from either the liveliest hues or the most delicately varied combinations. Mánes may thus be fairly styled a precursor of the new tendencies which reproduce Nature in her full optic brilliance. He was supported in this by his younger brother, Quido Mánes, a painter of less importance, it is true, but also a subtle observer and a colourist of distinction.
The deep significance of Josef Mánes in the evolution of Czech art lies in his profound insight into the soul of the people, his instinctive grasp of the type of art suitable for embodying the new ideas of his race and his nation. Happy in his artistic inspiration, he was far from happy in his life: it was one long series of struggles with a cramping environment of mediocre patronage for trivial work, with vexations of every kind, and finally with an incurable malady. In 1861, under Palacký’s aegis, he went to Russia with our “Moscow pilgrims,” but he, who had revealed Slovakia ​to Czech art and had been the first to divine the Slav soul, arrived there in a state of serious brain-trouble. The collector, Lanna, his staunch friend, hoped to cure him by sending him to Italy, but his sister, herself a talented painter, found him there in a deplorable condition. Later, he was seen back in Prague, wandering through the streets in broad daylight with a lighted candle in his hand, haunted by an obsession of strange yellow roses. He was visiting all the gardeners in Prague to ask for these roses, he was looking for them even in the neighbouring Bohemian Forest. Finally he passed away in 1871.
Josef Mánes’ work, by the masterly divination of the Czech soul that it reveals, forms the noblest page in the history of our art, and Mánes himself will remain one of our most cherished and most hallowed glories.
Towards 1860, progress is evinced in every field of national activity. Josef Mánes had not sacrificed himself in vain; at last the time had come to open up a free pathway through the thorny hedge in which the creator of a national Czech art had been so painfully entangled. His example gave food for reflection. Furthermore, by substituting for the abstract idealism of Cornelius and Overbeck, so much in favour with the Prague Academy, his concrete Czech idealism, and by putting in place of idealistic composition a direct and loving observation of real life and Nature, Mánes had pointed for his successors the way to France rather than to Germany. Accordingly, they soon learnt to turn their steps towards the West. In 1848, when vague rumours of the new evolutions achieved by the art of Western countries were already abroad in Prague, the young artist Jaroslav Čermák betook himself to Antwerp. From there he went on to Brussels to study under Gallait, and as early as 1852 he took up his quarters in Paris. He spent the remainder of his life in the City of Light. From 1850, when he won his first success with his “Slovak ​Emigrants,” he devoted himself to the portrayal of scenes from Czech history, with there and here a realistic genre picture in the sentimental manner of Gallait. In Paris his colouring gained in brilliance, the lessons of the great masters were thoroughly absorbed by him and he attained a mastery of technique. Meanwhile, the success of Hébert’s “Malaria” had turned the Czech artist’s aspirations into a new groove—the beautiful idealised peasant. He left off delving into history books and undertook two great tours—they may almost be called journeys of exploration—in the Jugoslav countries, full of romantic wildness, in Dalmatia, Herzegovina and Montenegro. Then there appeared at the Salons Montenegrin love-scenes and the heroic exploits of the Jugoslavs fighting for their freedom. These pictures had a very favourable reception.
His numerous pictures show that he was able to understand and analyse his model, and the little sketches he painted in Normandy and in the forest of Fontainebleau prove that he, a romantic historian, nearly became a realist of the Barbizon school.
Thus, it is to Jaroslav Čermák, as well as to František Zvěřina, a draughtsman of originality and an adventurous traveller in the most out of the way corners of the Balkan Peninsula, that we owe the introduction of the Balkans into Czech art. Moreover, his charm as a colourist and the harmonious flexibility of his composition ensure for these portrayals of peasants the approval even of those who see them to-day. Besides these semi-official works, which have been widely reproduced, Čermák has left us several portraits of merit, among them that of Madame Gallait, and an admirable series of studies made during his leisure moments in Normandy and at Fontainebleau, in which the influence of Decamps may be traced.
The pilgrimage to France now became the rule.
​There were many of these pilgrims, indeed, whose moderate talent could not sustain their early promise, and who, as if dazzled by all they saw, came back to sink into the quicksands of mediocrity. Some of them, on the other hand, are to-day in high favour. Such is the case with [[Author:Karel Purkyně|], son of the eminent Czech physiologist. Starting with genre pictures of the type that was in fashion about the middle of the century, he became in the end, after hard study in Paris, a realist in the French sense of the word. A restless and roving spirit, he left Munich for Paris, where he studied the older masters, regardless of his father’s advice that he should become a pupil of Couture’s. His apprenticeship was, above all, concerned with colour. Hence he used colour lavishly, and succeeded in obtaining from it some rather audacious harmonies, which, on his return to Prague, baffled the critics and led them to tax him with coarseness. Gradually he gave up exhibiting, and came to work for his private satisfaction only, keeping faithfully to that original and slightly barbaric style of his, always laying chief stress on colour. Thus he has left a few portraits and still life studies, all in direct contact with reality and distinguished above all by good brushwork. He died at the age of thirty-five, never understood by his contemporaries and entirely forgotten by the succeeding generation, to receive due recognition only from the younger men of to-day, who hail him as one of their forerunners.
Two other fervent devotees of French realism whose work met with no immediate response, were Soběslav Pinkas and Victor Barvitius. The former went to Paris in 1854 and settled for a considerable time in France, not leaving that country till 1865. He studied industriously under Couture, and was a member of the artists’ colony at Marlotte, in the Forest of Fontainebleau presided over by Henri Murger. He took up his residence at Cernay-la-Ville in Champagne—the lady whom he married ​while in France was a native of that province—and lived there at the house of his friend, the landscape-painter, Français. He was a genre and animal painter, and exhibited several times at the Salon. The few big pictures that he executed, representing animals, were sold in America. His picture, “Death and the Old Man” was rejected by the Academy as being too realistic, and was hung in the glorious “Salon of the Rejected.” He also went in for painting on china, and some of his majolicas were purchased by the Limoges Museum. After his return to Prague he remained loyal to realism as it was then understood in France.—The other Prague representative of French realism, Victor Barvitius, brought from Paris a whole series of genre pictures, in which fashionable life under the Second Empire is portrayed in a manner somewhat like that of Guys; and popular scenes with workmen, horse-copers and percheron draught-horses, in the robust style and soft colouring of Millet. These two artists, however, produced so little that they exerted no influence on the development of Czech art, although they might well have contributed in no small measure to its progress.
Nevertheless the more official Parisian art was not without its attraction for many a Czech artist. It drew to France in his youth Václav Brožík, who, while still a pupil of the Prague Academy, had taken a vow, before the dazzling canvases of the Pole Matejko, to become a historical painter. Eager to acquire training, he went from Prague to Dresden, from Dresden to Munich, where he studied under Piloty, and from there to Paris. In Paris he painted a huge canvas, ​“Ambassadors from Ladislav, King of Bohemia, asking Charles VII for the hand of his daughter, Madeleine,” which he exhibited at the Salon in 1878. From that time onward, his big pictures became more and more numerous, making their way to England, America and even Australia. This son of a humble blacksmith from the neighbourhood of Plzeň achieved a world-wide reputation. In his canvases, the glorious periods and the leading lights of Czech and universal history served as a pretext for introducing enormous groups of faces and figures and a sumptuous display of costumes and accessories.
While we may visit him with the usual disparagement that painters of this calibre have to face, we must not overlook his merits. In the first place, he is an admirable colourist. His expressive hues have nothing in common with the dry and pallid colouring of Piloty. On the other hand, as compared with Matejko’s oriental violence, Brožík’s colour-scheme appears well-balanced, free from eccentricities. The brilliance and warmth of his palette are the perfectly natural outcome of a patient and loving study of the old masters, first and foremost of that great Antwerp master to whom he paid an enthusiastic tribute in the gigantic picture entitled, “An Entertainment at Rubens’ House.” No doubt Brožík’s great devices are often nothing more than the arrangements of a skilful stage-manager, redolent alike of the theatre and of the studio; but there are some whose pathos does not by any means ring false, and before which every true Czech heart must feel moved. This is unquestionably the case with “The Condemnation of Jan Hus at Constance,” a work that has endeared itself to the whole nation. Very pleasing, too, are his easel pictures, done while on holiday in Normandy, and representing unpretentious scenes of everyday peasant life. They are on an altogether different plane from his great historical pictures, with their entirely theatrical mechanism. Here the artist breathes the fresh air that was lacking in his studio, here ​he has observed the unaffected poses and gestures that were foreign to his Paris models, here, finally, he has studied and reproduced real light, without any artificial illumination. Together with several portraits, they go to make up that portion of Brožík’s work which best stands the test of time.
In Brožík’s day, the City of Light set its mark even on those painters whose ideal was very far removed from historical painting. Bohemian landscape painters also realised that their art would not thrive unless they acquired a sound training in France. This was all the easier because Czech landscape painting never broke with the Baroque tradition and, despite the School, never lost sight of reality. After 1848, it was Adolf Kosárek, a highly gifted and penetrating artist, who more than anyone else achieved good results. Like so many others, he visited the Alps, at that time the Mecca of artists from Vienna and Munich; but he came back disillusioned, for the stern and rugged beauty of those gigantic heights struck no responsive chord in his gentle nature. The journey that he next undertook, following the impulse of his heart, to the graves of the Baltic Slavs in North Germany, likewise failed to inspire him in the direction of idealised classical landscape. He now felt convinced that, impressionable as he was, his eye would find something to delight it at every step he took, and that he merely had to look around him, in the Bohemian countryside, in order to possess all the material that a Czech landscape painter could require, an inexhaustible store-house of subjects for his brush. Already his pictures, still faithful to Romanticism, disclose a profound grasp both of the external and of the emotional aspect of the Czech landscape. Thus his “Hermit” illustrates how thoroughly he can seize the spirit of the landscape he selects, besides revealing a poetic fervour uncommon in his day. This realism of his grew ever stronger and stronger, in a series of works simple and even bare in theme, ​but imbued with all the lyrical tenderness of an artist, gentle-souled and marked out for an early death. The rocky knolls of the Czecho-Moravian tableland, with their covering of scanty grass, the wooded hills of the Czech countryside, its dells, its fields and its meadows, its ponds, its quarries and its thatched cottages nestling in luxuriant foliage—such are the subjects in which Kosárek’s art excels, and which he seldom enlivens with any human figure of romantic aspect.
As Kosárek had arrived at realism without any tradition to support him or any master to serve as a model, he did not follow out the principles of realism to their logical conclusions. He did not know that light and atmosphere are two capricious deities whose strife and reconciliation go to make up the fickle and elusive soul of landscape. Nor did he understand that realist painting demands the avoidance of dull, lustreless tints, too neutral on the palette. It was Antonín Chittussi, younger by a generation, who brought about the necessary reforms, but only after having known and appreciated the masters of Barbizon. At the age of thirty, dissatisfied with all that Bohemia had to offer him, he went to Paris. At the Salon of 1879 he exhibited “On the Banks of the Elbe,” an epitome of his knowledge and his skill as a Prague artist. In Paris, he did not sit at the feet of any particular landscape painter, but picked up his training everywhere and anywhere, listening notably to the language spoken by the painter-poets of Barbizon. In their wake, he roamed the Forest of Fontainebleau and followed the charming banks of the Seine; here was revealed to him, through the vibrations of air steeped in light, the very soul of the countryside. He also learnt to wield the brush with vigour and dexterity, and trained himself to observe with accuracy the busy and ever-shifting life of Nature. He rigidly excluded the human form, and even in his pictures of urban scenes only two or three figures are to be found. His sphere ​was the open country, and he painted it in every phase of the different seasons and times of day. He faithfully reproduced local colour, but his great ambition was to seize the colour-scheme as a whole, in the subtle combination made up by light and atmosphere. His early landscapes were still formal in composition, but soon he introduced into his pictures any chance fragment of Nature, being convinced that only a powerful personality, an original genius, would give it expressiveness and permanent value. Gradually he brightened his palette, and forced even the dull tints to yield freshness and brilliance. His sojourn in Paris was marked by a feverish activity. In 1882, he exhibited at the Salon “Le Quai de la Conférence” and in 1883 “On the Czecho-Moravian Tableland.” He returned to Bohemia for good in 1885, and devoted the six remaining years of his allotted span to studying the Czech country, its cities and its smaller towns, not even flinching from the great problem of a general view of Prague. But he was not very successful in these attempts to capture the old-world beauty of the capital, for his temperament was never really at home amid the haunts of men. In his numerous paintings he reproduced nearly every feature of Czechoslovak scenery. He revealed to us the beauty of our land, and at the same time taught us to revere each individual landscape as a portion of universal Nature. Later on, Chittussi’s example had a profound and salutary influence on Czech landscape painters. The generation now at work has achieved admirable results on the lines laid down by this artist.
Another powerful influence on the present generation of landscape painters was that of Julius Mařák, who acted as teacher to nearly all these artists at the Prague Academy. Although moulded by Vienna and Munich, Mařák enlisted under Chittussi’s banner. Like Chittussi, he aimed at seizing the very soul of a landscape according to the variations of time and light. Endowed ​with an extraordinarily lyrical temperament, he rendered landscape in terms of musical psychology, and it was as a musician that he composed cycles, in oils or in charcoal, of which “The Seasons,” “The Hours,” “Woodland Characteristics” are the best-known. By his scrupulous attention to reality he ushered in a healthier romanticism, one purged of all mawkish sentiment. Faithful observation of Nature and a sound mastery of form provide a solid basis for Mařák’s poetic conceptions. It was characteristic of the man that he expressed himself by the intensity rather than by the quality of his colour. A kind of chiaroscuro was the result, and this tendency led him even to substitute the charcoal-stick for the brush. With this technique he achieved some quite considerable work, like the famous cycle of “Woodland Characteristics.” But after all, Mařák’s chief claim to distinction lies in the wholesome influence which, as a teacher, he exerted on the succeeding generation. Profiting by his guidance, they all threw in their lot with the great Western tradition, and created for Bohemia her modern school of landscape painting.
Side by side with this more and more marked occidental trend of Czech art after 1848, the tradition of decorative painting inaugurated by Josef Mánes was carried on. In 1879, the seeds sown by the generous hand of that great artist were at last destined to yield harvest. The competition arranged in connexion with the pictorial decoration of the Prague National Theatre, which had just been built, produced the first results. Two young painters, as yet almost unknown, Mikuláš Aleš and František Ženíšek, won the first prize in that year for the decoration of the foyer, thanks to their joint series of wall-paintings entitled, “Our Native Land.” It could be seen at a glance that the young artists were ​determined to follow in the footsteps of the great Mánes. Like him, they went back to the fountain-head of Czech popular tradition. “Your country guided your hand,” remarked a foreigner, the Belgian Sweerts, director of the Prague Academy, at which they had but recently been students. To-day, we know for a fact that the originator of these lofty conceptions was Mikuláš Aleš, who made the first sketches; but contemporaries were inclined to give the greater part of the credit to František Ženíšek, a skilful manipulator of harmonious lines, who, by softening his colleague’s vigorous and expressive line, gave it more flexibility. The decorations were carried out on the spot, without the assistance of Aleš, by various collaborators acting under Ženíšek’s direction. To-day, however, we turn most readily to the superb designs of Mikuláš Aleš, finding in them all the tenseness and all the charm of the moment of creation. In his cycle, “Our Native Land,” Aleš draws on the resources of Czech legend and history, and personifies our country districts, our rivers, the scenes of our national glories. In the difficult framework of corner-pieces he achieved decorative paintings unrivalled in Bohemian art, rich in ideas, with a fullness and freedom of composition, and original in their arrangement of lines and masses. Everything pointed to the prospect that this painter of twenty-seven would create for us that great decorative art which the buildings under construction in a regenerated Prague demanded. But it was not to be. The unkindness of fate, which had already marred his first great success—perhaps, too, a certain languor inherent in his Slav temperament—thwarted his advance in this direction, and his remarkable gifts remained unexploited. He did some designs for the sgraffiti and frescoes of several buildings in Prague and in provincial towns, but his great ideas had no wider scope than his small scale designs. As instances, we may mention the heroic song of freedom he composes on the basis of ​themes from Red Indian Life (“The Elements”) or the great cycle “Old Slavonic Life,” where the instinct of genius makes up for the lack of scientific research. All through his long life, his unfailing creative impulse and his rich narrative faculty found no other outlet than drawings in pen-and-ink or charcoal, now and then set off with colour. The number of these drawings, some of them tinged with deep melancholy and others artlessly playful, a true mirror of his impressionable Slavonic soul, runs into thousands. Here Aleš, in a manner thoroughly his own, gives us his rendering of all that is dear to the heart of the Czech people: stirring pages of national history, outstanding personalities of our prosperous days and our periods of humiliation, the poetry of olden times, popular songs, tales and sayings. Learned in Czech history and literature, and one to whom patriotism was a religion, he conjures up, with a vivid and expressive line, and an extraordinary keenness and unity of vision, the great deeds of the past. Himself of provincial origin, he became the delineator of the countryfolk, depicting their manners and customs in all their old-world poetic charm. Like Mánes, he illustrated folk-songs, in hundreds of sheets where text, score and illustration form a living whole, thoroughly Czech in spirit. These drawings, reproduced in numerous copies, were distributed all over the country, and, coming into everyone’s hands, grew to be a notable part of the national heritage. Thus he became the educator of children, the friend of the great, the last of those “heralds”? to whom we owe our nineteenth century revival. Aleš, who died shortly before the war, is to-day the most popular of Czech artists, enjoying a fame which foreigners perhaps find it difficult to understand, but which has its roots in our very soul. Instinctively we fly to his drawings, for there, we feel assured, are the Czech mind and soul—livened and even enriched by this artist.
​In the pictorial decoration for the foyer of the National Theatre, as has already been pointed out, it was František Ženíšek’s supple grace that, in accordance with the taste of his day, prevailed over the rugged originality of his fellow-worker. Accordingly Ženíšek arranged after his fashion, but not to the best advantage, the panels of the foyer—“Legend,” “History,” “Antique Life,” “Heroic Song”—as well as the ceiling. His most characteristic and successful achievement, however, are the fine allegorical female figures with which he adorned the ceiling of the auditorium. In point of fact, so far as isolated figures are concerned, he displays a consummate mastery of draughtsmanship. His nudes, carefully studied from life, are remarkable for their beauty and dignity of form, the masses are connected by a pure and flexible line, and the proportions, types and gestures are conceived in accordance with that ideal of human loveliness which was realised by Josef Mánes. Nevertheless, in invention and composition, Aleš remains beyond all dispute the true heir of Mánes. Ženíšek’s invention is meagre and his composition almost negligible. Some few of his works, however, are not devoid of merit even from the standpoint of composition: among these are the “Meeting of Prince Oldřich and the fair Božena,” and the unfinished canvas, “Strawberries.”
The limitations of Ženíšek’s talent, where he could not avail himself of the collaboration of an Aleš, were already evident in the curtain—so poor in composition, with its four figures—which he painted for the National Theatre, and which was burnt in the disastrous fire of 1881. It will always be remembered how profoundly moved the Czech nation was by this catastrophe, and what feverish activity it displayed in repairing the damage. The services of another set of artists were requisitioned. From Vienna, Julius Mařák came to decorate the vestibule of the official box reserved for the King of Bohemia, with pictures ​representing the holy mountains of the Czechoslovak country: the mythical Říp where the ancestor of the Czech race came to a halt, the crescent-shaped Vyšehrad, figuring in so many legends, the royal Castle of Prague, the Blaník sheltering in its recesses the army of St. Wenceslaus before the final triumphant sortie; also Tábor and Domažlice, towns prominent in the Hussite wars, and other spots immortalised in the annals of Czechoslovak heroism. From Paris, Václav Brožík sent for the box itself a triple frieze glorifying Bohemia under Přemysl the Husbandman, Charles IV and Rudolf II.
The decoration of the Queen’s boudoir and of the staircase leading to the royal box was entrusted to a third artist, Vojtěch Hynais. Born in Vienna of Czech parents, initiated into art by Feuerbach and by the study of the great masters in Italy, he already had a very fair equipment in technical knowledge when he reached Paris. Paul Baudry, to whom he had secured an introduction, encouraged him with a few words of sincere praise and recommended him to Gérôme. In contrast to Brožík, who still adhered to the old methods, he acquired an enthusiasm for modern French painting of the luminous type. In 1879, he came into notice at the Salon through a fine Madonna with St. Albertine, and soon afterwards he took part in the re-decoration of the Prague National Theatre. He adorned the boudoir with four allegorical panels representing the four seasons, done partly while he was in Paris. Thus Prague came to know a new style of painting, saturated with light, in which even the shadows had a coloured transparency. The nudity of the figures is bathed in a limpid atmosphere, and they cast glossy reflections. The faces, and even the academic figures, are tinged with a piquant Parisian flavour. On the staircase, the allegories of Peace and of the Crown lands of St. Wenceslaus (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia) harmoniously blend idealistic composition with realism ​of forms. After the fire, Hynais returned to Paris to work out the sketch of the new curtain that he had been commissioned to paint. The idea had come to him in Prague, at the time of the catastrophe, when he had witnessed the touching scenes in which the Czech people gathered round the ruined building and hastily collected the money required for the reconstruction of its first national edifice. His conception, accordingly, was a picture in which female figures of great beauty and attractively modern—the Tragic and the Comic Muse—surrounded by poets, musicians and actors, await the solemn moment when they will be able to move into a building which a group of architects, artists and workmen are on the point of completing, while on the other side a vast multitude is thronging forward to offer a portion of its wealth for the accomplishment of the national task. The groups and figures of the picture are connected by a flowing, realistic rhythm, and no central over-emphasis, no pedantic symmetry disturbs the serenity of its arrangement. Hynais, as a realist—a paradoxical quality, this, in a painter of allegories—offers us in his curtain a slice of fresh reality, with only a slight degree of order to ensure its unity. The figures are no stock types, but genuine personalities, portraits of friends idealised merely by a little careless drapery, which certainly does not invest them with any classical remoteness. A dominant gray-green harmonises the discreet, transparent tonalities. Hynais’ curtain is a decisive symptom of the radical revolution that Czech art was undergoing about 1880. In Paris, he adorned the Villa Lecomte at Auteuil with four decorative panels, and began to make sketches for the decoration of the Municipal Theatre in Vienna, four quoins with eminent dramatic poets from Aeschylus to Grillparzer, four arches with the principal characters in the world’s dramatic poetry, friezes for boxes with children assembled in wayward troops (“The Children,” ​published by Armand Guérinet, Paris). The decoration was completed in 1887. In 1890 he produced his fine Sévres vase. His reputation as a decorative painter was growing in Paris, where he was made a member of the jury at the great Exhibition, won a first gold medal and became Knight of the Legion of Honour. Among his works that we possess in Bohemia, where he is at present a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, we must mention the allegorical picture “Truth,” daring in its realism, and the great canvas of “The Judgment of Paris,” remarkable for the brilliance of its colouring and the firmness and objective character of its forms. In Prague, he carried out the decoration of the cupola for the Pantheon of the Bohemian Museum, and has done some striking posters and excellent portraits.
By about 1880, the principles of Realist painting had been adopted by all. It was the rising generation of artists in particular that hailed them enthusiastically, without indeed always possessing the ability to accomplish the new programme to its full conclusion. Hynais’ influence, however, did much to brighten the palette of the younger men and to teach them to look at objective reality without the spectacles of the studio. The activities of Mařák and, at the Academy, of Pirner, also contributed their share, and by 1890 there were already a large number of artists who could pride themselves upon a sound technical training. Many of these, however, have fallen off since then, and we shall name here only a select few who, by virtue of their talent and their sincerity, have worthily maintained their position. After 1885, Beneš Knüpfer sent to Prague the pictures he was painting in Rome. He devoted himself to seascapes. At Porto d’Anzio he studied the sea in its ever-changing aspects, the texture of its surface, the rhythm of the waves in calm and in stormy weather. With subtle perception he observed the delicate interplay of sea and light-soaked atmosphere. His ​poetic faculty and pantheistic vision of his favourite element led him to people it with ethereal sirens, tritons and robust centaurs wrestling and disporting themselves in the brine. On returning to Bohemia he found that his sea-pieces, true to an ideal that had been abandoned, had lost much of their pristine attraction. He decided to revisit the scenes that he loved so well, but on board the ship that was taking him from Dalmatia to the shores of Italy, he tied a big stone round his neck and threw himself overboard.
A realist of importance for the development of Czech art now appeared in the person of Hanuš Schwaiger. He had received his training in Vienna, where Rahl, Canon and Makart were still burning incense to the great masters of the past. Accordingly, like the rest, Schwaiger loved to linger in the museums. He gained there enormously in technical knowledge, and studied the precepts of the old masters as if all art were contained within their limits. Above all, the Dutch and the old Germans held him in thrall, fostering his ingrained love of realism. They inspired himto works in which-although colour had no secrets for him—he expressed himself as a draughtsman rather than as a painter. He recast old stories in a modern mould, thus combining his reverence for the past with an overmastering impulse towards reality. It was on these lines that he drew and coloured the “Anabaptists,” a vast congeries of faces, attitudes and gestures, imbued with an almost brutal truth; and he illustrated ancient tales with a novel blend of imaginative fantasy and realistic observation. Slowly, through this charmed circle of imagery on the antique pattern, he drove a road towards a pure reality, with its sensations of life lived to the utmost. His visits to the country yielded him figures that flashed across his vision on the highways, beggars, tramps and gipsies, and he deliberately laid stress on their physical and moral abasement. Trips to Holland, ​the example of Israëls and Mesdag had taught him that there was no need whatever to look for inspiration outside his own age, and he set himself with greater zest to rendering the reality that lay about him, painting his “Amsterdam Fish-market” and, in Moravia, genre pictures drawn from Valach life. Finally we see him reverting to his former ideal, resuming the work of his youth. As teacher at the Prague Academy he exerted a happy influence on his pupils, imbuing them with his ripe experience in craftsmanship, and accustoming them to look naked reality squarely in the face. Thus he prepared the ground for the final stage of realism—impressionist painting.
About 1890, his great native faculty marked out the youthful Luděk Marold, in the eyes of his contemporaries, for a brilliant career. Formal study, however, did not come easily to him; both at Prague and at Munich, his active, restless temperament, his bent for real life, his unconventional ideas of form and his lack of respect for discipline forced him to break away from the School. When scarcely out of his teens, he already aroused astonishment by his sketches, in which line and colour were intimately blended to give an illusion of living form. At Munich he supplied illustrations for novels and for the comic paper, Fliegende Blätter. On his return to Prague he entered Pirner’s studio, and high hopes were entertained of him both by School and public. He won much favour in 1888 by his “Prague Egg-market,” a picture in which he contrived to portray with an energetic brush a scene brimful of life and light. The following year he was sent to Paris to study under Galland. But the boulevard life overflowed too much into the studio, and the voice of Paris, ever buzzing in his ears, was that of a Siren not to be resisted. Here, too, he played truant, and roamed the vast city, with no other teacher than life itself, absorbing in his soul the Parisian crowd, the faces of passers-by, the eternal merry-go-round ​of the streets and the fashionable glitter of the drawing-rooms.
In order to earn a livelihood, he turned his impressions of Parisian life to account, doing illustration-work, supplying the great Parisian firms which soon learnt to exploit his industry and fertile imagination. Thus he did illustrations for Daudet, Bourget, Theuriet, the Margueritte brothers, the Rosny brothers, Pierre Louys, Yriarte, Erckmann-Chatrian and such periodicals as Le Monde Illustré and L’Illustration. But the longer he stayed in Paris, the more he became a prey to home-sickness. Accordingly he returned to Prague, where he was at first engaged in painting the panorama of the Hussite battle of Lipany, in which he gave full scope to his deftness in technique. He was projecting several other works when death removed him in 1898, at the early age of thirty-three.
Marold’s patrons had hoped that, by sending him to Galland’s studio, they would mould a teacher who would represent official French art at the Prague Academy. The artist’s irrepressible temperament, however, brought the plan to nought. Nevertheless, the mission was fulfilled, though not of set purpose, by the Moravian Alfons Mucha. After a first attempt that failed, he managed to settle in Paris, where he attended the studios of Lefèbvre, Boulanger and Laurens. Like Marold, he had to do illustration-work for the sake of a livelihood. A poster for the first performance of Gismonde at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt brought him fame. Orders for posters came thick and fast, and in 1897, at the Salon de La Plume, he got up an exhibition that made no little stir. At the great Paris Exhibition of 1900 he carried out the decoration of the Bosnian Pavilion, was awarded a medal and admitted to the Legion of Honour. Among his illustrations, we may single out for mention those done for Seignobos’ “Scenes and Episodes from German History,” in which ​we can trace the influence of the French historical painters, notably of Laurens. The lithographs for the “Princesse Ilsée,” by De Flers, and the “Paternoster” series are executed in the poster style which Grasset made familiar in the streets. The figures, a little stiffened by a hieratic symbolism, almost Byzantine in character, are essentially decorative: they are drawn with a pure, precise line, calligraphic even, and the colour, remarkable for its softness, is added only as an afterthought. Mucha’s work contains many elements borrowed from the old illuminated manuscripts, but he also contrived to turn to decorative uses many forms taken from living Nature, especially from plant life. On his return to Prague he devoted himself entirely to the great enterprise of his “Slav Epic Cycle,” an enormous series of huge historical canvases in which he harked back to the point where he started.
The time has come for citing a name which will serve to mark the transition to the next generation and which, after enjoying in France a certain authority before the war, earned distinction in the glorious struggle of France against Germany. In fighting under the tricolour, František Kupka also fought for the cause of Czechoslovak freedom. After Marold and Mucha, he is the third Czech artist to become acclimatized in Paris. Although an ardent realist, he contemplates reality with a mordant irony, and even when he is confronted with the great mysteries of life and the universe, we find him seized with a sombre ecstacy. A vein of philosophic reflexion often runs through his canvases, and their composition and technique betray an independent, even a rebellious spirit. He too, became an illustrator in order to earn a living. The comic paper, L’Asstette au beurre, published his scathing attacks upon the plutocracy, clericalism, Prussian militarism, social hypocrisy, in which he always displayed a fertile invention and a consummate knowledge of form. His drawings ​for Elysée Réclus’ “L’Homme et la Terre” are far above the usual level of book-illustration in their philosophic spirit and never-failing wealth of imagination, and the etchings for Leconte de Lisle’s “Erinnyes” and the engravings in colour for the “Lysistrata” of Aristophanes rank among the finest productions of their class. Now that he has come back to us, we hail him with gratitude as one of the first Czechs who, at the call to arms, sped to the French standard.
With Kupka we reach the generation whose output goes to form the Czech art of to-day. This generation has finally thrown over academic prejudices and devoted itself whole-heartedly to realism. Sternly critical both of itself and of Czech art in general, it has determined no longer to lag behind the rest of Europe, but to follow, systematically and with increased energy, every forward step that was taken abroad. Plein air painting was the order of the day. But these artists, escaping too hastily from the school into untrammelled Nature, soon lapsed into anarchy. Relying solely on their instincts and their emotions, they renounced all method and all discipline. A generation of Impressionists thus sprang up, but one that had no common, central aim, and did not recognise that true impressionism is not mere anarchy, but a method like any other. As time went on, the frenzy cooled down, and once more it was the lofty teachings of French art that recalled the younger men to order and moderation. Towards 1890, they joined in an association that drew its title from the illustrious name of Mánes. This society founded an art review—Volné Směry (The Free Tendencies)—and began to show great activity in all directions. Entering into close intercourse with foreign countries, it made the Praguers acquainted, through its review and its exhibitions, with all that is of any value in current European art, in French art first and foremost.
​Before the great French Impressionists reached Prague, their successors—Besnard, Harrison, Amant-Jean, Henri Martin—were known in our capital. Nor was it long before the great masters themselves came into the public eye. The visits of our young artists to Paris grew more numerous, and their contact with French artists more direct. The “Mánes” association pursued an unflagging propaganda. The Free Tendencies issued reproductions of Manet, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, Rops, Forain, Willette, translations of Huysmans and Mourey and original articles by Camille Mauclair and Charles Morice. The jingoes, it is true, at the instigation of a coterie of artists who saw in this propaganda a menace to their feeble “national” production, raised an outcry against the invasion of Bohemia by foreign art: as a result, the exhibitions were poorly attended, and ended up with a deficit. But the devotees of French art did not let themselves be discouraged, and thanks to them the year 1902 may even be called epoch-making. To their unbounded delight, they were able to open in that year, in the handsome pavilion which the architect Jan Kotěra had built specially for the occasion, the first exhibition outside Paris of Auguste Rodin’s magnificent work. The great sculptor himself came to Prague, and received from its citizens a royal welcome. After this, an exhibition of paintings brought within our purview, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Carrière, Puvis, Maurice Denis, Maufra, d’Espagnat and others. But as the great impressionist masters were inadequately represented, every effort was made to get specimens of their work, and in 1908, Prague saw Daumier, Boudin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassat, Raffaëlli, the genre-painters, Bonnard, Vuillard and Laprade, the neo-impressionists, Signac and Cros, and the three inaugurators of a new art: Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Of all the exhibitions held by the “Mánes” Society ​up to 1913, ten were given over to French art. Thus every branch of French graphic art has been seen in Prague. Among later exhibits were Rodin’s drawings, a rich collection of statues by Bourdelle, and finally some works of the ultramoderns, from Matisse to Derain and Bracque. The struggle of the “Mánes” on behalf of French art ended in a victory, and what Czech art had gained by that victory was speedily recognised.
The “Mánesist” generation is still at work to-day. There are some who, while availing themselves of the foreign teaching in cases where they can find no local tradition, accentuate more strongly the regional note in their work. Others have owed nothing to any foreign model, and have formed themselves entirely through contact with their own country. To this class belongs Joža Úprka, the painter of the Moravian Slovaks, his compatriots. He received his training in Prague and in Munich, finished it off with a journey in the West and then, establishing himself in a Slovak village in the heart of the district to which he has since devoted all his activities, and where he has worked out for himself an original plein air method, he sought at first to seize the soul of Slovakia in genre paintings a trifle “literary” in quality. But his palette, heavy at first with the opaque tones of the Munich school, grew brighter and gayer as he became more familiar with his Slovak environment and as the lively hues of the peasant costumes took his fancy. In the end, he came to use pure tonalities without blending them, and his brush, at first too prone to render the minutæ of detail, soon acquired a sweeping, vigorous stroke. It was, in fact, this that made him an Impressionist painter. His intimate knowledge of the country enabled him to reproduce with astounding accuracy Slovak scenery, and the faces and gestures of the inhabitants. Moreover, to him man and Nature are but one, and the animal rather than spiritual side of man is brought into ​prominence. He painted peasants at their labours, moments of rest or of noisy merriment, depicting his figures now in their working clothes, now in their Sunday best—masses of bright, crude colour flooded with light. Even when he throws these slices of real life on to a big canvas, he takes little heed of formal arrangement. Some traces of arrangement may be found in a few of his earliest works, such as “The Feast of St. Anthony” and his picture of village manners, “ The Procession of the Magi”; but the rest of his paintings show a freedom of rhythm thoroughly in keeping with an immediate record of things seen. Although he has studied his Slovakia under every aspect of season or time of day, his favourite hour is noon, when the red, yellow, blue and green hues of the costumes are ablaze in the summer sunshine, the contours of the landscape shimmer in a light-soaked atmosphere, and human features stand out in relief as clear-cut as on a medal. In Moravia, Uprka has become the leader of a group of painters who, under his guidance, profess an uncompromising regionalism, and have erected at Hodonín, the centre of their activities, a “Fine Arts Gallery,” with rooms for exhibitions.
It was at that time a creed with local artists that an uninterrupted stay in the heart of the country gave the artist an opportunity of discovering the soul of the ordinary people, and that his pallet would gain in richness of colouring by his observation of the variegated local costumes. Accordingly the painter Jaroslav Špillar went to the district of the Chods, in order to depict the glory of this courageous race, the vigilant guardian of the Bohemian frontiers, and it is for the same reason that Augustin Němejc sought his inspiration in the surroundings of Plzeň, among the peasants who, unfortunately, were gradually giving up their traditional national costume. Again, landscape-painters under the leadership of Kosárek and Chittussi, endeavoured to find some new expression ​for painting. Their efforts were not in vain, for Antonín Slavíček, the Czech landscape-painter par excellence, emerged from this great movement. Slavíček was a pupil of Matřák at the School, but, exasperated at his teacher’s monochromy, he soon felt attracted towards Chittussi, whose true successor he was destined to become. Accordingly he went out into the country to paint meadows studded with flowers, and fields of ripe corn. In looking at these pictures to-day, we find it hard to understand the indignation of his teacher, who saw in them symptoms of revolt, so dim is the colour, so finicking the form, so enigmatic the sentiment. For all that, he has already begun to come under the spell of plein air, although he vacillates, varying his processes over a long period, now making use of values and now dispensing them with them, yet in one way or another his pictures already place him at the head of Czech landscape-painters. About 1900 all his work was already that of a pure impressionist, intoxicated with air and light. He then came to indulge in violent tonalities which amazed the public, and did not shrink from exaggerating this or that shade in order to obtain the effect he aimed at. At this stage he generally used the forms of technique that suited his fiery temperament and were adapted to open air work—tone-blending, tempera-painting, pastel. In “The Soul of the Birches,” one of the first impressionist pictures painted in Bohemia, his method is not yet entirely free from clumsiness. On the other hand, the paintings subsequently executed by Slavíček in a village of the Czecho-Moravian tableland clearly reveal how he was succeeding in making his processes more flexible and in adapting his method to the varying requirements of the landscape. This region, with its unproductive soil, where weavers wrest from the land a bare livelihood, soon came to have a peculiar attraction for him. It was not long before pity turned into ardent ​love. No longer did he hunt after interesting themes: a squat thatched cottage, two or three stunted trees, a few sparsely cultivated fields, a muddy road—these were enough for him to express in unforgettable pictures all the attachment of his passionate soul for a little desolate corner of the universe. He even wished to found there an artists’ colony, a school. Soon he grew weary of improvisation, and felt an urgent need of a discipline that should control his volcanic temperament and enable him to bring larger landscapes within the scope of a single picture. By dint of stubborn and ungrudging labour, he succeeded. In his “At our home, at Kameničky” he already shows the application of this new method. Returning to Prague, Slavíček was struck with the picturesque beauty of the old, poorer quarters doomed to disappear through the modern improvements, and with an alert and forceful brush he set himself to portray, in a long series of small-scale pictures, the old streets with their variegated shadows, the tumbledown houses with their wrinkled façades and quaint roofs. In this work done in the open air, his palette gained in brightness and his stroke became a blur of colour. The mass of blurs began to whirl round, the outlines were effaced, the picture seemed to be an orchestration of colours shimmering in light. He now grew bolder and essayed landscapes of colossal scope, painting the whole city of Prague or rather certain moods of Prague in the changeable season that precedes the coming of spring, completing enormous landscapes in a few days, working at a feverish pace, but with an admirable creative impulse. The pictures, “Prague, near Troja,” “The Vitava seen from the top of the Letná Hill,” and “The Elizabeth Bridge” are agglomerations of houses and roofs dissolved into dots of colour, noble symphonies of the hundred-towered city, of glittering Prague, such as Slavíček’s generation saw and loved. Slavíček next tried his hand at a theme that ​needed most careful manipulation—he sought to capture the Gothic soul of Prague Cathedral in a picture taking it in as a whole. He resolutely made attempt after attempt, but the gigantic framework of the building remained intractable. Accordingly he put off the enterprise to a later date and, for reasons of health, went to stay in Dalmatia, at Ragusa. There too, faced with the new element, the sea, he set about painting, and brought back pictures of an unalloyed impressionism. Restored to health, he went back to his old habitat in the mountains, and had energetically resumed work when an apoplectic stroke robbed him of the use of his vigorous hand. He was taken to Prague, where he recovered in so far that his enfeebled hand was able to attempt still-life studies. But the doubts that racked him, his anxiety as to his artistic future, proved too much for his impetuous spirit. He decided to make an end of it all, and blew his brains out in February, 1910.
Slavíček has become the great master of Czech impressionism. His talent was eminently original, and owed hardly anything to foreign influences. Of the French impressionists he knew very little, and what he did know was not work of the best quality. He lived long enough to leave behind him mature productions. Another landscape-painter of the same generation, Otokar Lebeda, also highly gifted and fond of making experiments, did not have time to give us his full measure. This pupil of Mařák, who likewise completed his education by a visit to Paris, began working at a furious pace, as if he were determined to force himself upon the public notice at the earliest possible moment: then suddenly, at the age of twenty-four, he committed suicide. The exhibition of his paintings opened only a few days before his death had revealed an artist of high rank, a bold innovator, who would probably have taken an honourable place at Slavíček’s side.
​A comrade of Slavíček, Antonín Hudeček, in his youth had several artistic points of contact with his friend. Together they would go out into the country and make similar experiments in colour and form. Hudeček however, softer and more poetic, avoided trenchant colours, wove gentle, almost musical harmonies, and seized with a loving hand the inner soul of a landscape. Later, he adopted an almost pointillist style, as more suitable for rendering the subtle transitions of light from hour to hour of the day. Later still, his painting showed a remarkable accession of strength; vigour took the place of delicacy, and his composition became synthetic. The new method resulted in pictures of a virile beauty and wide compass, greatly appreciated abroad, where Hudeček has exhibited a good deal.
Among the younger devotees of impressionism we may mention Oldřich Blažíček, a pupil of Schwaiger, but one who quickly renounced his teacher’s conservative ideals, while applying the solid craftsmanship acquired under his direction. The landscapes he painted were bright, cheerful and sparkling with life. Otokar Nejedlý was a disciple of Slavíček, and long remained loyal to his forceful teacher. But from the very outset such works as “Sunday” and “The Funeral Procession” bore witness to an original talent, a bold temperament and a singular manual dexterity. As an impressionist intoxicated with colour, he went to Italy and Sicily, and later on, eager for sensations, as far as Ceylon and India. The two years spent in the tropics revealed to him plastic mysteries of colour that drove impressionism into the background. Yet he was still unable to throw impressionist processes entirely overboard: on the contrary, he ran through them all, including pointillism. On his return to Bohemia he devoted himself to experiments in synthesis. He now fashioned for himself a style that was to some extent decorative, but did not satisfy him. Accordingly a new crisis ​arose in his career, the symptom of a radical change. Of this we shall have something more say hereafter.
Jindřich Průcha, although not a pupil of Slavíček, remained more faithful to his ideal. His was a meditative nature, and he made up for his lack of facility by a remarkable industry and intelligence. He had given up the study of letters for that of painting, and worked outside Prague, in a secluded nook among the mountains, whose mystic soul he wished to probe. His landscapes are therefore more than a patchwork of coloured blurs in the Slavíček manner; his colour is highly expressive and acquires an almost symbolic value. Průcha was little known to the public. His career was interrupted by service in the war, and he was killed on the Russian front in 1915.
Among the founders and the shining lights of the “Mánes” society was Jan Preisler, who died in 1917. From the very first he occupied a place apart among his contemporaries, looking backward more than they did, conscious of a larger debt to tradition than a generation of revolutionaries would acknowledge. For all that, his keen vision did not fail to catch a very early glimpse of the new art dawning above the horizon. From Ženíšek’s studio, where he served his apprenticeship, he brought away with him a profound idealism and a fondness for dreams. From his earliest attempts onward, Preisler’s work strikes a personal note. His youthful masterpiece, the “Spring” triptych, that poem of adolescence, betrays a large measure of spirituality in an age of ruthlessly realist painting. The things that the impressionists raved over seemed to Preisler thoroughly trivial and insipid. He refused to adopt a purely materialistic view of the universe, and everywhere he divined mystic bonds and relationships. Strange figures thus appeared in his pictures, figures closely bound up with the Czech countryside and having nothing in common with the types depicted in the classical Isles of the ​Blest. They were creatures of a poor soil, his own native soil, young people of little beauty, grim-visaged, spare of frame, but with the intense fire of the visionary burning in their eyes. Although formed by Ženíšek and a marvellous draughtsman, Preisler seemed to have no feeling for beauty of form. For him perfect form was the expression that fully and flawlessly bodied forth the painter’s aim, even at the cost of a certain stiffness and lack of freedom. Hence he resisted the lure of the beautiful line, and, although colour had no secrets for him, did not even let himself be beguiled by its exclusive spell. Gradually, however, a change was wrought in his outlook. The Czech countryside became a dream-landscape, and its inhabitants were transformed into ideal types of humanity. Preisler even lost for a time the happy balance of his youth. He had set himself to seek a new language in which to translate his visions of Arcady. He used his colours daringly, even brutally, and drew near to the French innovators of the period. He painted pictures where, in a mad whirl of pure colours, there appeared an unknown yet living country, peopled with fair nude figures. Preisler had become a pantheist poet, intoxicated with the illimitable life of the universe.
The sobering down came in 1910, with a big order, the decoration of a reception room in the Prague City Hall, which had just been built. All that he had acquired during previous years was here summed up and harmonized in accordance with the best principles of painting for public buildings. Here are groups of lovely dream-figures, linked by a powerful rhythm that sings in resonant tones what the easel-pictures could but murmur softly—the cosmic harmony, the mysterious bonds between worlds, beauty and joy of living. When these decorations were finished, Preisler worked in retirement, no longer sending anything to exhibitions, but entirely absorbed in the quest of the ​pure idealist picture. He was in fact entering on a new stage in his production, with works of an uncommon, almost classical beauty, a stage that was not revealed to us, alas! until the posthumous exhibition of his paintings in 1919.
In his earliest work, Max Švabinský, another famous “Mánesist,” showed much the same sort of youthful inspiration as Preisler. He was the rising hope of the professors, and, as soon as his triptych “Love” and his symbolist picture “Blended Souls” were exhibited, sprang into the front rank of public favour. An adept in all the techniques, he had soon created a special technique of his own, one that he wielded as a virtuoso, executing even his big pictures in pen-and-ink. A series of portraits stamps him as a shrewd psychologist, knowing how to decipher the spiritual face of his sitter behind the outward physiognomy and gestures. He also made his mark as a decorative artist, painting two panels for the Bohemian Royal Land Bank. A two years’ stay in Paris completed his training. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900 he received an honourable mention for his portrait of Maeterlinck. On his return to Prague he painted a large picture which he entitled, “The Land of Poverty,” and in which he finally summed up the dreams and sentimental yearnings of his youth. More and more did he come to draw his inspiration from real life. He designed in pen-and-ink and subsequently illuminated a large disc representing a woman seated behind a weaver’s loom. This picture met with a tragic fate, being burnt in the great San Francisco earthquake. Švabinský’s portraits of Czech poets, artists, scholars and men of science soon came to form a whole Pantheon of national glory in which many of the dead are portrayed no less vividly than those painted from the living model. From individual portraits Švabinský went on to large groups, depicting the members of a family with a profound insight into the intimacies of kinship and a consummate mastery ​of composition. After this, the poetic impulse which had inspired the symbolist works of his youth suddenly re-awakened in him, provoking a reaction from the realism which then had the upper hand in his production. But at the same time, there appeared a remarkable change in his susceptibilities. The slightly abstract spirituality of his younger days gave place to an entirely sensuous vision of life and Nature, and flesh and blood began to speak in their vibrant tones. Nudes emerge from interiors filled with an intoxicating atmosphere of carnal passion. Colour, which here too illuminates, assumes a greater importance, and the charm of chiaroscuro, obtained by the play of pen-and-ink, is enhanced by penetrating and subtle harmonies. The blue of the bird of paradise contrasts vividly with the gold of brocade; the waxen lustre of camelia blossoms stands out against soft, heavy draperies. The artist’s fantasy now knew no limits, and his vision of fair women’s forms was removed from the warm atmosphere of the studio to the open air, amid landscapes real or imagined. At the same time, the engraver’s tool became his favourite instrument. He collected his “Etchings” and had them published by Jan Štenc, at Prague, with a preface by M. Camille Mauclair. Etchings such as “The Morning Hunt” or “A Summer Night” show the fine creative mood, the serenity of soul which their author had then attained and which was never to leave him again. The cycle of small etchings with the simple title of “Summer” records immediate impressions of the countryside, during the blazing days of a sunlit summer. Švabinský then turned aside for a brief spell to decorative work: like Preisler, he decorated a room in the Prague City Hall, executing an open air group of Czech poets, painters and composers. After this he returned to his love for the brush, painting the “Bouquet,” so rich in its colour-scheme, and his studio with all his family, an admirable group portrait. Gradually, we come ​to recognise in his work the traditional note of Josef Mánes, the charm of his round contours and the warmth of his inspiration. His feminine nudes, glowing with robust health, are verily of the same stock as the young peasant women of the Master.
Švabinský subsequently applied himself once more, with amazing industry, to his experiments in the various graphic arts. His attempts to represent a pair of lovers in the midst of a tropical forest resulted in a series of etchings with a thread of unity running through them, and entitled “Virgin Forest.” But he had already felt the attraction of wood-engraving, with its workmanship at once precise and solid. Accordingly he engraved on wood a large portrait of Josef Mánes, a portrait of himself, and a fine allegory of Summer, and started on the “Paradisiac Sonata,” a vast cycle of engravings in which his pair of lovers re-appears in the shade of the palm trees, giving themselves up to the happy, animal life of primitive mankind, in the company of wild beasts and butterflies.
In the generation of “Mánesists” Švabinský is one of the most powerful and original minds. Among his contemporaries he now holds the first place, and he is well-known abroad. William Ritter has devoted to him an enthusiastic article in L’Art et les Artistes.
The ranks of the Mánesists include no artist more intelligent than Miloš Jiránek. A man of wide culture, translator of de Musset and author of several monographs, he was perpetually exercised by problems of art, theoretical or practical. Thus he was always investigating, always making experiments. He tealized that impressionism had already reached the final stage of its evolution, and accordingly tried his hand at expressionism. But he did so entirely for his own satisfaction, as a fanatic for truth, almost as a moralist, and never to gratify the fashionable whims of the moment. Each new discovery in form or colouring ​was dearly paid for by an undue expenditure of nervous energy. His brain went under in the struggle, and an untimely death put an end to his sufferings. His friend Karel Myslbek, son of the great sculptor, was equally well versed in literature, and translated the French poet Cazalis; a vigorous designer and a painter of original talent, he loved to portray on his canvas, with a sombre colouration that often reminds us of Zuloaga, the little world of Prague’s submerged tenth, casual labourers, beggars and blind men at the street corners, emigrants leaving the stations, hospital patients. As an officer of the reserve he was compelled to go to the front, but with his sensitive spirit he preferred death to the task of killing his fellow men. He committed suicide at Cracow in 1915.
Another “Mánesist,” František Šimon, is a Parisian of long standing. Establishing himself in Paris as early as 1903, he studied the life of the masses and of society on the boulevards, in the parks, restaurants and dancing halls. He went to the seaside resorts of Brittany, Belgium and Holland, and visited the South of France, Spain and Algeria. He went in for colour-engraving, the revival of which had just been taken in hand by the great impressionist masters. The engravings he exhibited at the Salon attracted attention: Sagot and G. Petit took notice of him, and the Société de la gravure en couleurs elected him a member. He took part in the spring Salon, later in the autumn Salon. G. Petit became his publisher, and in 1910 opened an exhibition of his works, paintings and engravings; his “Bruges under Snow” was bought by the Luxembourg. He was then elected a member of the new Société des peintres-graveurs en noir and corresponding member of the Société des peintres-graveurs francais. He achieved remarkable success in England, where a series of his works may be seen in the South Kensington Museum, and in America, where several ​exhibitions of his work have been held. After living for ten years in Paris he settled once more in Prague, where he often reverted to the brush, turning to account many an impression he had received in Paris, resuming his idealistic composition and painting portraits.
It is in Paris, too, that Karel Špillar learnt to enjoy and record the sensations that he gathered at the theatres and music halls of the capital or at the seaside, transposing every impression into a gentler, more intimate key. The slender grace of the Parisienne in particular caught his fancy. Returning to his native land, he practised idealistic composition after the Arcadian manner of Jan Preisler. In the same way Hugo Boettinger, having come under impressionist influence in Paris, recovered his visions of youthful nudes living in perfect harmony with the beautiful scenery where their innocent gambols take place. It seems a paradox to remark that this dreamer is a gifted caricaturist. In his caricatures, he becomes an unflinching realist, lightly emphasising this or that feature, this or that peculiarity of his subject, but never dropping the very human attitude of a kindly humourist.
A younger man than these, the portrait painter Vratislav Nechleba rapidly acquired an extraordinary skill in brushwork and a popularity uncommon for a beginner. In his numerous portraits he revived the ideal of the old masters, their values and their chiaroscuro, yet without abandoning his own point of view as a staunch and consistent realist. Another very popular artist, Jakub Obrovský, has a sensuous love of colour, and mingles opulent female nudes, gay-hued draperies and luxuriant plant life in compositions which assault the eye with their violent decorative rhythm. Among the engravers, we may mention Vladimír Silovský, a pupil of Švabinský, whose graving-tool accurately seizes the special atmosphere ​of the various quarters of Prague, and Antonín Mayer, who chose for his etchings subjects taken from rustic life, reveals a talent which is bound to grow.
All these artists, young or old, had their origins in the Czech realism and impressionism of the period round about 1900. Some of the younger men, however, have since then thrown over the impressionist programme and arrived at synthesis on the pattern of the French, notably of Cézanne. The little group of the “Eight” began the movement, which carried painters, sculptors and architects in its train. Debates and even quarrels ensued, in which the young innovators found champions even among the founders of the “Mánes” society. None the less, a schism arose, and a new society and a new review were started. In course of time the young rebels came to find favour with the public, many misunderstandings were removed, and after years of uncompromising defiance and restless experiment, the new school have calmed down somewhat and rejoined the “Mánes” society, which has once more become the rallying-point for all who take their art seriously, a centre where the younger and older generation alike pursue their researches with a feeling of mutual respect. It is becoming more and more evident that Czech art has gained by this crisis and by this heated exchange of ideas which have probed the different points of view and infused new life-blood into an art that seemed to be suffering from exhaustion. The crisis produced among others Otokar Nejedlý (see p. 36), formerly an explorer of exotic beauty, who has since become a painter of his native countryside. Without lingering over the surface impression he makes straight for the inner structure of the landscape. After the war he proceeded to France to paint those sectors of the Western Front where the Czechoslovak troops took part infighting the Germans. With him went Vincenc Beneš, who, after attempting expressionism and even cubism, returned to ​the straightforward portrayal of Nature, in solidly constructed paintings.
Emil Filla, spiritual guide and principal pillar of the society of the “Eight,” continues to remain faithful to cubism, although he once gave evidence of his great talent as a painter in pictures which reflect the art of Daumier and of El Greco. The efforts of the younger generation are directed towards a mid-course between expressionism and cubism. They all aim at the realisation of synthetic expression, but in their search for this goal each takes a different path.
Josef Čapek continues his search. He challenges form, and is not afraid to change the formula of his art. Jan Zrzavý, despite his former modernism, draws nearer to the old tradition, a fact of which the casual observer would not be aware.
The works of the decorative painters evince more intelligible tendencies than is the case in modern painting. In Prague the School of Decorative Art is the centre of these tendencies. Thanks to the endeavours of the artists who have emerged from this school, graphic art and illustrative art have attained to a very high artistic level. The painter František Kysela has restored mural decoration and placarding, and illustrative art is greatly prized both by him and by his friend Jaroslav Benda, most methodical in his graphic works. It is also to V. H. Brunner that the illustration of books and periodicals owes its highly artistic standard. To Zdeněk Kratochvíl must be attributed the development of caricature, which has made such considerable progress in recent years.
The present-day artistic culture of Bohemia is of an amplitude and variety that contrast strikingly with its modest beginnings. Art has become an important element in the national life, and the part it plays is perhaps all the greater in that the nation is a comparatively small one. Even the war was unable to stifle ​Czech art. The people which showed such a stubborn vitality in resisting the enemy surrounding it on all sides, also fought for its independence in carefully preserving from German influence its spiritual treasures, its art. Now that our country is free, let us hope that the function of art will be more decisive, its evolution more rapid, its output more abundant.
* ↑ See H. Jelinek, La Littérature tchègue contemporaine, Paris, 1912, Ed. du Mercure de France.
* ↑ A man of no mean lit ability, he was for thirty years a correspondent of the great French newspapers, and all his influence to smooth the way for Rieger’s interview with Napoleon III. On his return to Prague, he inaugurated the Alliance Française and was for sixteen years its President. In 1870 he wanted to enlist in the army of his beloved France, but was compelled to abandon the project. At any rate, during France’s darkest hour, he kept open house for escaped prisoners. He brought Gambetta’s envoy, Emile Picot of the Institut, into touch with Palacký and Rieger, and the result of this interview was the famous manifesto of the Czech deputies. He was a knight of the Legion of Honour.
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