The Rough Guide to Prague by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241196342
Publisher: Rough Guides

Third and fourth floors: Czech art 1890–1930

Visitors to the Czech art 1890–1930 collection are confronted by Otakar Švec’s life-sized Motorcyclist, a 3D depiction of the optimistic speed of the modern age. Out on the third-floor balcony, there’s a feast of architectural drawings, scenography and industrial design from typewriters and vacuum cleaners to wooden aeroplane propellers. Highlights include Josef Čapek’s costume and set designs for Janáček’s operas, and a model of the Müllerova vila.

On the fourth floor are several wood sculptures by František Bílek, one of the country’s finest sculptors – for a more comprehensive insight into his anguished art, you should visit the Bílkova vila. Jan Preisler’s mosaics and murals, which feature on Art Nouveau buildings all over Prague, tend to be ethereal and slightly detached, whereas his oil paintings, like the Black Lake cycle displayed here, are more typically melancholic. The most successful Czech exponent of moody post-Impressionism was Antonín Slavíček, whose depictions of Prague remain perennially popular, as do his landscapes, ranging from the Klimt-like Birch Mood to paintings such as In the Rain, which are full of foreboding. There are a couple of oils by Alfons Mucha, both classic long, narrow poster designs; one is an unfinished version of the Gismonda poster for Sarah Bernhardt, which propelled the artist to fame in Paris in 1894.

The fourth-floor collection ends in a foyer area, known rather wonderfully (on each floor) as the Respirium, where sculptures by Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Štursa, two of the most important Czech Art Nouveau artists, dominate. On the balcony, you can see models and drawings by fin de siècle architects such as Jan Kotěra, Balšánek, Polívka and Oldřich.

The third floor has a series of works by František Kupka, who was Czech by birth, but lived and worked in Paris from 1895 and was one of the first artists in the Western world to exhibit abstract paintings. His seminal Fugue in Two Colours (Amorpha), one of two works he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1912, is displayed here, along with some earlier, pre-abstract paintings (a couple of self-portraits, a family portrait, a Matisse-like portrait of a Parisian cabaret actress and Piano Keys – Lake, a strange, abstracted, though by no means abstract, work from 1909) plus a pretty comprehensive selection of his later abstract and cosmic works. As you leave the Kupka section, don’t miss the small side-room displaying the photography of František Drtikol, whose Art Deco nudes made him internationally famous.

The Edvard Munch retrospective exhibited in Prague in 1905 prompted the formation in 1907 of the first Czech modern art movement, Osma (The Eight), one of whose leading members was Emil Filla, whose Ace of Hearts and Reader of Dostoyevsky – in which the subject appears to have fallen asleep, though, in fact, he’s mind-blown – are both firmly within the Expressionist genre. However, it wasn’t long before several of the Osma group were beginning to experiment with Cubism. Filla eventually adopted the style wholesale, helping found the Cubist SVU in 1911. Bohumil

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