Abstract
Among those who interest themselves in modernism in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prague is sometimes referred to as the “second city of cubism.”2 Paris, it goes without saying, is cubism’s first city and capital, but the style was embraced in Prague with a vigor unmatched in Europe outside of France. In 1911, a group devoted to the defense and promotion of the new art, the Skupina výtvarných umělců or Visual Artists Group, was founded in Prague. Its members wrote extensively about cubism in their journal Umělecký měsíčník [Art Monthly] and elsewhere, sponsored numerous exhibits of the art in Prague, and facilitated the display of Czech cubist experiments abroad. Between 1912 and 1914, the Skupina organized six exhibits of cubism, five in Prague and one at the Berlin gallery Der Sturm. These shows featured the work not only of Skupina members but also of the style’s founders, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as well as that of other of its pioneers.
The Czechs have moved to the forefront of the modernist movement.
—Guillaume Apollinaire, 19141
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Notes
See Rostislav Švácha, ed., Kubistická Praha/Cubist Prague, 1909–1925 (Prague: Středoevropská galerie a nakladatelství, 2004) and
Emmanuel Starcky and Jaroslav Anděl, eds., Prague 1900–1938: Capitale secrète des avant-gardes (Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, 1997). On the place of Czech cubism in the artistic world of Austria-Hungary see
Bruce Garver, “Czech Cubism and Fin-de-Siècle Prague,” Austrian History Yearbook, 19/20 (1983/84): 91–104 and
Magda Czigány, “Imitation or Inspiration: The Reception of Cubism in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1910–15,” in Decadence and Innovation: Austro-Hungarian Life and Art at the Turn of the Century, ed. Robert Pynsent (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 74–81.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 196.
Emil Filla, “O ctnosti novoprimitivismu,” OaS, 38–40. Originally published in Volné směry 15 (1911). Volné směry is usually translated into English as Free Trends or Free Directions, but I believe Open Paths is a better if slightly looser rendering. For an excellent overview of this distinguished journal’s history see Roman Prahl and Lenka Bydžovská, Volné směry: Časopis secese a moderny (Prague: Torst, 1993). 13.
Karel and Josef Čapek to Vlastislav Hofman, [spring 1911], in Karel Čapek, Korespondence I (Prague: Český spisovatel, 1993), 112F.
See Viktor Dyk, “Němci v čechách a české umění,” Lumír 42 (1914): 331–34. The article is a criticism of Franz Werfel’s clumsy attempts at reconciliation between Prague Germans and Czechs. Werfel argued for greater understanding between the groups on the basis that the Czech arts were the “child” of German culture. It was precisely claims of this sort that infuriated Czech nationalists.
František Langer, Byli a bylo (Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1991), 141. The Union Café, or Kavárna Union, was the chief meeting place of the artists of the Czech prewar modernist movement.
Letter from Josef Čapek to Vlastislav Hofman, [beginning of 1911], cited in Vojtěch Lahoda, “Kubismus jako politikum: k dějinám Skupiny výtvarných umělců,” Umění 40 (1992): 50.
Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), xvii–xxx. Schorske may be guilty of overstating the pervasiveness of the inward turn since important figures of Viennese culture, such as the writers Karl Kraus or Robert Musil, do not fit comfortably into his scheme. His thesis has been challenged thoroughly over the years on these and other grounds, and I too count myself among its revisionists, but it still provides an exceptionally fruitful means of thinking about the cultural life of Habsburg Central Europe and so remains a touchstone for most studies of the subject. There are good reasons, moreover, for continuing to take many of Schorske’s claims seriously despite his over- generalization. As will be seen in the pages that follow, the artists of Čapek’s generation looked on Viennese modernist culture in much the same way that he describes it: as aestheticist, interiorized, and withdrawn from the realities of contemporary life. For a collection of important critiques of Schorske’s thesis see Austrian History Yearbook 28 (1997) and
Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001).
Péter Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 71.
The outstanding study of this process is by Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 86–139.
For the best discussion of the Manifesto and the generation of the 1890s, see Katherine David-Fox, “The 1890s Generation: Modernism and National Identity in Czech Culture, 1890–1900,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1996).
The situation was of course significantly more complicated for the Jewish artists and writers who identified themselves as Czech. Although antisemites always denied it, it was nonetheless increasingly possible to be both a Czech and a Jew, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century ever greater numbers of Bohemian Jews were identifying themselves as “Czech.” By 1900 more than half the Jewish population of Bohemia had declared itself Czech. See Hillel Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61.
See Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (New York: Continuum, 1993).
See Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). The book opens with a description of a rash of suicides among young Austrian artists and intellectuals in 1910.
Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), x. If, in Spector’s terms, the German-Jewish writers of Kafka’s circle were “deterritorialized,” that is, lacking a naturalized way of grounding claims about politics, society, culture, and above all identity, then the artists and writers of Čapek’s generation were profoundly “territorialized.” For a vivid portrait of Prague’s deeply divided Czech and German cultures, see also
Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).
Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 464.
See, for example, Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna; Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity; Harrison, 1910; David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880–1942 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); and
Gerald N. Izenberg, Modernism and Masculinity: Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky through World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
See H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage, 1977).
See Jeffrey Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), esp. 49–105. See also
Christopher Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1987) and Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 181–210.
Josef Čapek, “Kandinsky: Über das Geistige in der Kunst,” Umělecký měsíčník 1 (1911–12): 270. Neither he nor Karel distinguished sharply between expressionism in its Viennese, German, or other incarnations.
Josef Čapek, “První Berlínský podzimní salon,” Lumír, 42 (1914): 94.
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© 2013 Thomas Ort
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Ort, T. (2013). Prague 1911: The Cubist City. In: Art and Life in Modernist Prague. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077394_2
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