Abstract
“To the Age Its Art, to Art Its Freedom” was the famous slogan of the Viennese Secession formulated in 1897. The young artists of Karel Čapek’s generation rebelled against almost everything the Secession and its Czech disciples stood for, but in these basic goals, they were at one with their predecessors. Like modernists everywhere, they wished to make art appropriate to the age while also furthering the perfection of art’s own inner laws. They deplored the alienation of art from everyday life that seemed characteristic of modern times and desired to “return art to life,” that is, to base art on contemporary conditions and experiences alone. Attributing the gap between art and everyday life to the persistence of cultural forms inherited from the past, the worst offenders in their minds were historical and naturalistic art. Utterly divorced from modern reality, these styles in art and architecture represented little more than nostalgic fantasies of the unified cultures of the past and could never bring about the unity of which their proponents dreamed.
Long live:
the liberated word, the new word, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, pathetism, dramatism, orphism, paroxysm, dynamism, plastic art, onomatopoeism, the poetry of noise, the civilization of inventions, and journeys of discovery!
Long live:
machinism, sports fields, Frištenský, the Českomoravská Machine-Tool Works, the Central Slaughterhouse, Laurin and Klement, the crematorium, the cinema of the future, the Circus Henry, the military concert on Střelecký Island and in Stromovka Park, the World’s Fair, railroad stations, artistic advertising, steel, and concrete!
Long live:
modernism, life in its fluidity, and the art of civilization.
Long live:
Vincenc Beneš, V.H. Brunner, Josef Čapek, Karel Čapek, Otakar Fischer, Otto Gutfreund, Jóža Gočár, Stanislav Hanuš, Vlastislav Hofman, Josef Chochol, Pavel Janák, Josef Kodíček, Zdeněk Kratochvíl, Bohumil Kubišta, František Kysela, František Langer, Stanislav K. Neumann, Otakar Theer, Václav Špála, Wojkowicz, etc!
—Stanislav K. Neumann, 19131
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Notes
Stanislav K. Neumann, “Otevřená okna,” AŽŽ, 67–68. Originally published in Lidové noviny, August 9, 1913. Frištenský was a famous Czech boxer, the Českomoravská Machine-Tool Works was one of the largest Czech industrial enterprises, Laurin and Klement was a Czech car and motorcycle maker. Part of the translation and explanation above is taken from Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 158.
A handful of examples include Karel Čapek, “Henri Bergson: Das Lachen,” OUKI, 394–97 (originally published in Přehled, May 15, 1914); Jaroslav Kabelka, “Ideové vztahy novodobé filosofie a moderního umění,” Volné směry 17 (1913): 131–34; Jaroslav Kabelka, “O filosofii Bergsonově,” Přehled, March 21 and 28, 1913, 443–44, 473; Stanislav K. Neumann, “Ať Žije Život!” AŽŽ, 43–55 (originally published in Lidové noviny, August 2, 1913); Rudolf Procházka, “O podstatné proměně duchové povahy naší doby” Umězecký měsíčník 2 (1912–1914); and Tankred [Tancrède]
de Visan, “Filosofie Henri Bergsona a současná estetika,” trans. Hanuš Jelínek, Lumír 41 (1913): 416–20, 443–48.
Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4–5.
Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 51. The artists and writers of the Czech prewar modernist generation were familiar with most of Bergson’s major works from before the First World War, including Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Laughter (1900), and Creative Evolution (1907). For the brief description above, however, I have drawn primarily on An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), an essay in which Bergson summarized most of his key ideas up to that time.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), 292–95.
František Langer, “Problém generací,” in Tvorba z exilu (Prague: Akropolis, 2000), 246. This essay was originally delivered as a lecture on June 10, 1944, during Langer’s wartime exile in London.
See Rostislav Švácha, The Architecture of New Prague, 1895–1945, trans. Alexander Büchler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 100.
Vladimír Šlapeta, “Cubism in Architecture,” in Czech Cubism : Architecture, Furniture, and Decorative Arts, 1910–1925, ed. Alexander von Vegesack (London: Laurence King, 1992), 34–36.
Pavel Janák, “Otto Wagner,” Styl 1 (1908–1909): 48.
Pavel Janák, “Od moderní architektury k architektuře,” Styl 2 (1910): 105–9.
Most scholars of cubist architecture cite the German psychologist Theodor Lipps as the source of Janák’s ideas about the motion of mental life, for example, Marie Benešová, “Architektura kubismu,” in DČVU, 330; and Ivan Margolius, Cubism in Architecture and the Applied Arts: Bohemia and France, 1910–1914 (North Pomfret, VT: David & Charles, 1979), 12. It seems to me, however, that an equally possible source is Bergson, particularly the theory outlined in Creative Evolution, in which the philosopher explicitly equates consciousness with motion and describes it as life in its purest, freest state. But Janák never mentions by name Lipps, Bergson, or any other source for his ideas. Karel Čapek, on the other hand, did comment on Creative Evolution at length, though not until 1920. See chapter 3 for a discussion of his understanding of this important text.
Vlastislav Hofman, “Duch moderní tvorby v architektuře,” Umělecký měsíčník 1 (1911–1912): 127–35.
Vlastislav Hofman, “Příspěvek k charakteru moderní architektury,” Umělecký měsíčník 1 (1911–1912): 229–30.
Otakar Theer, “Mladá česka poesie,” Přehled, March 7, 1913, and “Dvě generace,” Národní listy, July 9, 1913. For an excellent account of the generational split announced by Theer see Evá Strohsová, Zrození moderny (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1963).
Ladislav Matejka, ed., Czech Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1973), 347. See also
Arne Novák, Dějiny českého písemnictví (Prague: Brána, 1994), 243.
See Josef Kodíček, “Z nové poesie III,” Lumír 41 (1913): 449–52;
Josef Čapek, “J. Karásek ze Lvovic Posvátné ohně,” Umělecký měsíčník 1 (1911–1912): 143–44; and Strohsová, Zrození moderny, 14.
See Karel Čapek, Básnické počátky—Předklady (Prague: Český spisovatel, 1993).
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© 2013 Thomas Ort
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Ort, T. (2013). Between Life and Form: Karel Čapek and the Prewar Modernist Generation. In: Art and Life in Modernist Prague. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077394_3
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