Antonín Matějček

“ 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. ”

“ Well-balanced composition, figures austere and monumental, yet glowing with the internal fire of an intense faith, a consummate mastery of craft together with an extreme simplicity of expression—such are the characteristics of this work, so aptly placed in the striking position selected for it, as if to symbolize the unquenchable vitality of the Czech revival, and to prove beyond all doubt that Czech sculpture has become a genuine art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A few monuments and statues serving to decorate the Charles Bridge in Prague were the uninspired products of this barren epoch.
But already, while these two Germans were enjoying their ill-deserved renown, the first Czech sculptor, Václav Levý, a self-taught artist, was hewing from the sandstone rocks of the picturesque Liběchov, groups and isolated figures drawn from Czech history and folklore. A romantic temperament, violent and still undisciplined, is here seen struggling towards self-expression, boldly shaping the material under the impulse of a powerful instinct for plasticity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Kafka’s work, under the influence of French sculpture, an entirely new sensitiveness to impressions comes to the fore, reacting nervously and restlessly on the life about him to a degree hitherto quite unusual in Bohemia. The heroic-cum-patriotic idyll that formed the atmosphere of Myslbek’s studio here gives place to the palpitating life of our day. In Paris, Kafka had set himself to hunt after fresh sensations, to scrutinize the various phases of the modern man’s complex mentality. ”

“ With the advent to power of Czech society, the ambition of building on a more lavish scale made itself more and more felt in Czech circles, and with the enrichment of economic life in Bohemia, architects were faced with a whole series of problems in town planning to be solved. It was naturally in Prague, where the Czech element had recently come to dominate the German minority, that the new architectural impetus was displayed in its greatest intensity and brilliance. After remaining too long behind the times, the city of Prague now hastened to ensure her growth in size and beauty. ”

“ To-day, it is clear that the Prague National Theatre is the culminating point of the Neo-Renaissance in Bohemia, although, at the time it was built, that style seemed to be preparing for a still more magnificent flight. The enthusiasm of master-builders, the ever-growing number of architects loyal to the Renaissance creed, all seemed to foreshadow for Czech architecture a golden age, which the development of this style seemed certain to ensure. Nevertheless, true inspiration had ended with Zítek. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The free plastic decoration in the niches of the façades, the attic and the pylons, also bears witness to the logic of the architect’s mind and the purity of style with which, even in this kind of work, he was able to clothe his idea. In the interior, his mastery in the art of arranging spaces and observing proportion is amply evident: the vestibule, the staircases, the corridors and the auditorium form a disciplined, lucid and practical whole, the foyer and the rooms adjoining the auditorium are flawless in their consistency with the rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The portrait of the painter Švabinský is a work of remarkable insight, and the female figure entitled, “The Gifts of Heaven and Earth” is a creation full of life, the warmth of the blood making itself felt through the velvety suppleness of the form. Thus in Štursa’s work life has once more begun to speak in deeper, intenser, more penetrating accents.
Among the younger men, Otokar Španiel, after being trained under Myslbek, followed the example of Mařatka, Kafka and the rest, and went to finish his apprenticeship in Paris. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”