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

Those who consider themselves familiar with Cubism and its lock opener 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 tenders a fascinating survey of architectural drawings, furniture, ceramics and metalwork which form into a body the Czech venture into Cubist applied art and design between 1910 and 1925 alone in Bohemia, as it was then called, did Cubism influence of that kind an array of art forms and exercise in the way that direct an impact on urban life.

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

The leading artistic clump was the Manes Association of Plastic Artists, rested in 1887, which published the magazine Volne smery (Free Directions). It was Manes which organized an influential series of present art exhibitions in Prague: displays by Rodin in 1902, chew audibly 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 revolveed towards France by the Mines exhibitions split from their mentors, who did not share the growing enthusiasm for the Cubist experiment. A fresh group, Skupina Vytvarnych Umelcu (SVU) The assemblage of Plastic Artists, and a of recent origin magazine, Umelecky mesicnik (Artistic Monthly) were locate 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 real first contact with the challenging fresh style, Czech artists grasped Cubism with confidence and swiftly turn rounded it to their own artistic intentions 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 lock opener works of Analytical Cubism. on the other hand Czech painters, who had eagerly taken up Cubism's formal innovations, remained real to the current of spiritual and humanistic inquiry which has played of that kind 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 discloseed highly individual styles, using Cubist [i]modus operandi[/i]s but creating with them a synthesis of form and easy in mind very different from the plenteous more cerebral works of their Parisian counterparts.

Kubista, who had predicted in a alphabetic character from Paris to the painter Benes in 1910 that "Picasso and Braque are going to have a real strong influence," used the Cubist way as a device to strengthen an already powerful expressionist diction His subject matter remained traditional, continuing to include biblical controls such as St. Sebastian (1912) and dramatic incidents like as The Murder (1912) along with the Cubist staples of still life and landscape. Capek made many studies of single figures, on the contrary rarely extended the simple planes and angles with which they are fabricateed to create the kind of spatial totality that was of like central concern to Cubism's planters Filla remained the most faithful to the Cubist turn of expression as defined in Paris, following it from one side all its various phases. Perhaps greatest in quantity 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 at any time drier and thicker palette.

The greatest in quantity 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 below 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 proces a "geometric material part as the residue of an abstract vision and real form." These phrases well describe his possess sculpture and designs for phenomenons 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 on the outside into the world of things and the life of the clan making it part of their hold central European search for a synthetic mode of expression something which could unite all the arts in an expression of the human spirit.

It was Janak who wrote the lock opener essay of 191 1, "The Prism and the Pyramid," which station out his theory of "privileged forms." These included the pyramid and the triangle, which he engrossed in sketches for architectural facades, testimonials and interiors and in actual buildings of the like kind as the Fara house (1913) and in furniture similar as a side chair of 1911-12 His essay "On Furniture and Other Things," published in Umelecky mesicnik in 1913 presents his thoughts on the affinities of Cubism--"the "style of our time"--and the triangle. Janak studied the architectural use of the triangle by the agency of Vitruvius, Palladio and Vasari and compared its use in the records of the Old Town of Prague, which "made without well."