Czech Cubism

In a number of places across Europe around 1910, the enthusiasm for breaking down the formal rules of image composition and subversive movement, inspired by the machine aesthetic of the modern world, permeated the visual arts. In France, the cubist movement around Pablo Picasso and George Braque was born; in Italy, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti published a futurist manifesto; and in Germany, the expressionist art groups Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke emerged. These influences are also gaining resonance in the Czech environment. In particular, the approaches of the first two movements are strongly imprinted in the text Hranol a pyramida by Pavel Janák from 1911, which can be considered the unofficial programmatic statement of the Cubist movement in Bohemia. A movement that was never officially organized. Mostly its active creators - architects Josef Gočár, Pavel Janák, Vlastislav Hofman and Josef Chochol, painters Emil Filla and Antonín Procházka, Bohumil Kubišta or Josef Čapek, and sculptor Otto Gutfreund - were members of the Prague Arts & Crafts cooperative Artěl, which was based on the tradition of the British Arts & Crafts movement, or the Group of Visual Artists (split off from the Mánes Society of Visual Artists). They knew each other, communicated themes, organised joint exhibitions and had a support among important theoreticians such as V. V. Štech or Vincenc Kramář, who not only wrote the first comprehensive essay on the work of the Cubists, but was also a frequent collector of their works. 

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The movement was primarily an avant-garde response to the popular citation of the Vienna Secession, which appeared in design and architecture in Bohemia just before 1900. The international decorative style for a wealthy clientele was gradually replaced by the more locally expressive forms of Art Nouveau, and this expression was brought to an absurd point just after 1910 in the cubist forms, which had already practically renounced any artistic detail and reduced their forms precisely to the dynamic penetration of geometric surfaces. 

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The simple aesthetics were supposed to represent the modern age and wide social accessibility (although in reality this was not always the case), renouncing the vague fluidity of Art Nouveau and replacing it with a simple and sharp expression. This, according to Janák's text, is, as it is said to have always been in history, merely an expression of the action of basic physical forces: while antiquity is static and embodied by vertical and horizontal forces, it is opposed by an approach close to the thought of the Gothic - the oblique forces cut the vertical mass of the pillar (into the shape of a prism or pyramid), thus establishing, through its inorganic geometric foundation, the tradition of modern abstraction, as we see it in French painting at the same time. At the same time, they construct the ornamentation of the crystal, a fundamental element of Cubist design that has a strong spiritual significance as a Platonic solid. A highly spiritual object thus becomes an object of everyday life.

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Pavel Janák's cubist pose with its characteristic white surfaces and black edges is considered the most generative in terms of expressing the dynamics of the internal forces of matter; similar austerity is found in architectural works such as Bedřich Kovařovic's Chochol Villa or the apartment house in Neklanov Street, or the Diamond Palace and the cubist lamp, both by Emil Králíček. To the more contextual and radical cases can be added the House at the Black Mother of God by Josef Gočár, which, in its brick red colour and dramatic geometry, is considered one of the best new buildings in the historical monumental environment in the entire twentieth century. But crystalline geometry does not only appear in porcelain and architecture. It can also be found in furniture by Vlastislav Hofman or the aforementioned architects Gočár and Janák. 

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The First World War suppressed the production of arts and crafts and the arts and crafts industry. With the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic, Cubist artists in architecture and design took a different, less radical direction, which, in turn, was to represent the expressive richness of the national decorative tradition and to become the basic aesthetic language of the new state, both internally (buildings of institutions) and externally (especially in design). This contemporary fashion, sometimes referred to as rondocubism, was instrumental in shaping the preconditions for the international design approach of the 1920s and early 1930s, referred to as art-deco. By contrast, it was already far removed, ideologically and artistically, from pre-war Cubism itself. 

Cubism as a globally unique epoch with a very distinctive aesthetic is conveyed to the world by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, which in the 1980s organized a successful exhibition in Prague, which subsequently became a touring exhibition in various variations in many countries around the world. This sparked a renewed interest in Cubist design, including the resumption of production of a number of designs. Janák's and Hofmann's Cubist ceramics fetch staggering prices on world markets and are prized adornments in the collections of the world's leading museums from London to New York to Tokyo.

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Josef Holeček 

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