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It is easily
forgotten that Prague is further West than Vienna. The geography of our
imagination is a construct sometimes independent of physical reality.
Until 1918, Slovakia and the Czech Republic
were part of the Austrian Empire and their artists had easy access to
all that was going on in Vienna and the rest of Europe.
Frantisek
Kupka
(1871-1957) was born in Opocno in East Bohemia,
and is best known today as one of the pioneers of abstraction. But ne
turned in that direction when he was already past forty and had a
considerable Symbolist œuvre behind him. He was a precociously gifted
draughtsman, whose first lessons were from his father. He left school at
thirteen and was apprenticed to a saddler. Five years later, he took
classes with the Nazarene painter Frantisek Sequens, while working as a
medium to supplement his funds. Sequens taught him that art must concern
itself with poetic and philosophical issues.
Kupka
was an avid reader
who devoured Plato and Mme Blavatsky, the Vedas and Schopenhauer,
Bergson and Nietzsche. Another
Nazarene painter, the obscure Karl Diefenbach, revealed to
Kupka
the affinities between painting and music.
In 1895 he left for Paris, where he came under the influence of Forain,
Ensor, Steinlen and
Toulouse-Lautrec. Technically very able,
Kupka
produced works in a wide variety of styles, from political satire
touched with populist irony to the grandiloquence or mysticism of the
Symbolist idiom. Even within this idiom, his manner is extremely varied:
decorative mysticism in The Principle of Life and dramatic
fantasy in The Black Idol. The latter was clearly the
inspiration for Dracula's castle in Francis Ford Coppola's film. In the
painting known as Epona-Ballade or The Joys,
Kupka
places his
dark-haired companion of the day alongside an earlier mistress who had
died in 1898.
Kupka's superlative technique allowed him to work in many different
styles. Certain of the works he painted on his arrival in Paris show a
flawlessly naturalistic idiom, while the realism and irony of his line
opened the way for a career like that of
Felicien Rops. But
Kupka
was a
man of very different character, and a combination of many factors -his
penchant for the esoteric, his passion for music, and the impact of the
1909 Futurist manifestations - precipitated the breakthrough into
abstraction.
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Frantisek
Kupka
(see collection)
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Frantisek
Kupka
The Principle of Life
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Frantisek
Kupka
Money
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See on the next page:
Alphonse Mucha
(Master of Art Nouveau)
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See also: Art Nouveau
See also:
Pin-Up Art |
The
international career of Alphonse Mucha
(1860-1939) illustrates the great mobility enjoyed by artists in this
period. Born in Moravia, he worked in Vienna and in Munich before moving
on to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian and ultimately won
considerable success. His drawings were regularly published in various
periodicals including ha Plume, and he drew numerous posters for Sarah
Bernhardt. He decorated the Bosnian pavilion at the 1900 World Fair and
spent some years in the United States before returning to his own
country, where he devoted himself exclusively to painting.
Mucha
was a
virtuoso in many domains; he designed exquisitely intricate jewelry and
his drawings and posters are the embodiment of Art Nouveau.
His first commission from Sarah Bernhardt was a matter of luck. He was
at his printer's workshop on Christmas Eve when news came that the
famous actress wanted a poster within the next few days. All the other
artists having left, the printer had recourse to Mucha, who was then
unknown. The printer disliked
Mucha's design, unlike Bernhardt, who was
delighted with it and continued to commission work from him for many
years.
One of the original features of
Mucha's posters was his habit of working
from photographs, as many surviving examples show. His paintings have
undeniable charm, but he himself was too content with life to express in
his work the intense melancholy (or affectation thereof) which pervades
the work of his Symbolist colleagues.
Between 1795 and 1919, Poland had no official existence, having been
divided into three unequal parts under Prussian, Russian and Austrian
government.
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Like many other Symbolist artists from
Khnopff to
Klimt,
Mucha
made substantial
use of photography. A friend of Nadar and of other major Parisian photographers
of the period, he depicted the large-format bellows camera designed for portrait
photography that he used in the drawing The Photographic Art.
Ingres had already
remarked that photography "is very beautiful, but you mustn't say so", and at
its invention, photography terrified artists; they threw down their brushes in
despair at the perfection with which photographs captured reality. In the 1850s,
the many painters who used photography for their work tended to conceal and even
deny the fact. Others, like
Delacroix, openly admitted using it.
Mucha
did not suffer the typical dichotomy of the 19th century artist who used
photography but was anxious about its relation to art. He loved
photography for itself, was a lifelong amateur photographer and made
widespread use of photos in his work. For him, the camera was a useful
toy that performed the task which Baudelaire scornfully attributed to
it, that of documentation, note-book, and timesaver.
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In the second half of the
19th century, Prussia and Russia began to enforce a policy aimed at
assimilating the population. German and Russian became the official
languages and the teaching of Polish in schools was no longer permitted.
The Austrians governed the southern part of Poland, including Cracow,
the former royal capital. Their occupation was less repressive, at least
to the extent that Austria did not try to assimilate the Polish
population. This probably accounts for the fact that the Symbolist vein
in Polish art was largely centred on Cracow.
Poland's oppression lasted for over a hundred years, despite a number of
insurrections, and inevitably left its mark on the arts. Like other
countries similarly oppressed - we might compare Ireland or French
Canada - the national language and the national faith helped define and
preserve the national identity. Above all, the lack of a true national
government meant that Polish identity had to be represented and defended
by a "government of souls", and this became the mission of writers and
artists. This responsibility is constantly invoked in the writings and
paintings of the period; one cannot expect to understand the development
of Polish art without some notion of the historical situation.
True, Polish representatives sat in the Austrian parliament (and even,
at one point, in the Russian Duma), life was not uniformly difficult and
the wealthier classes in the Austrian part of the country were not
averse to speaking German. Hence the importance assumed by the duty of
memory, as embodied in the person of Stanczyk. He was a clown at the
royal court in the 16th century, but 19th century literature turned him
into a personification of lucid patriotism.
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The almost "sacred" status
of memory also explains why a number of artists and intellectuals sought
to return to their "roots" among a peasantry which had, in their view,
remained culturally pure. Two of the protagonists of this movement, the
poet Lucjan Rydel and the painter and writer Stanislaw Wyspianski,
married women of peasant families. These themes are developed in
Wyspianski's play The Wedding (Wesele) of which Andrzej Wajda has made
an excellent film.
Polish artists of the turn of the century travelled as widely as any
others, finding their way to Paris, Berlin, Munich and Saint Petersburg.
Wladyslaw Slewinski was in Pont-Aven with Gauguin and returned to Poland
as the bearer of the good news. But the most striking and dramatic
spokesman for Symbolist ideas in Poland was the writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1867-1927).
Przybyszewski's features are known to us from
Munch's painting
Jealousy. He is the bearded figure of greenish complexion behind whose
back two lovers meet.
Munch, Strindberg and Przybyszewski all met in
Berlin; the point of contact may have been Przybyszewski's wife, Dagny
Juel, who was Norwegian. She was also a woman of great beauty and both Munch and Strindberg seem to have been fascinated by her. The painting
no doubt reflects this situation.
Przybyszewski was a poet, theoretician of art, and occasional pianist,
who cut a scandalous, not to say a devilish, figure. Borrowing from the
repertory of the then fashionable Satanism, he coolly urged those who
turned to him for advice to commit suicide. His complicated private life
ended in tragedy for Dagny Juel.
He settled in Cracow when he was thirty (a year after
Munch's portrait),
and his house soon became known as "Satan's Synagogue" after the title
of one of his novels. He befriended Stanislaw Wyspianski and together
they founded the magazine Zycie (Life), which became the organ of "Young
Poland", an artistic and literary movement. Przybys-zewski was at pains
to offend the Catholic sensibility of his compatriots, proclaiming a
blasphemous distortion of the famous opening phrase of the Gospel of
Saint John: "In the beginning was lust." This led him to a satanist
theory of the creation of man and woman. It was Satan, he declared, who
separated the original androgyne (a notion borrowed from the humorous
myth recounted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium). The two sexes thus
created have desperately sought to return to unity ever since. We must
therefore thank Satan for the joys and torments of sexual desire.
Art, according to Przybyszewski, is a reflection of the absolute, and it
is the artist's duty to reveal the "naked soul" (naga dusza) and to give
utterance to the "cry" of the individual. Whatever the merit in these
ideas, the tinsel in which Przybyszewski wrapped them has not worn well
and has tended to discredit them.
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Jacek Malczewski (1858-1929) was a pupil of
Jan Matejko, a supremely rhetorical painter whose entire œuvre was devoted
to the glorification of Polish history. A similar obsession with history
transpires from the poignant works that
Malczewski devoted to Poles
deported to Siberia. This is the subject of In the Dust Storm; a dust devil on a country road becomes a powerful metaphor for the
way in which the memory of the fettered bodies of the deported could
surge unexpectedly into the mind.
The grandiloquent rhetoric of paintings such as Melancholia (1890-1894) and Vicious Circle (1895-1897) returns to the obsessive
question of the nation's frustrated hopes. But
Malczewski did not
restrict himself to this subject, and treated both mythological and
Christian themes. Death itself is the subject of several of his
paintings. In one of these (Thanatos I), death is represented by
an androgynous winged figure who draws an old man out of his manor by
running the whetstone over the blade of a scythe. The old man
represented is the artist's father, who had died four years before. In
another (Death), the angel of death lays her fingers as if in a
healing gesture upon the eyelids of the man kneeling trustingly before
her.
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Jacek Malczewski
(see collection)
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Jacek Malczewski
Death
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Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) was born in the small town of Drohobycz where
he taught drawing after studying architecture in Lvov and art at the
Vienna School of Fine Art. A major author (best known for The Street of
Crocodiles), he was also a fine draughtsman and engraver. The majority
of his work was destroyed during World War II, but the extraordinary
sequence of prints entitled The Book of Idolatry (1920) fortunately survived. It is devoted to a single subject - the
voluntary humiliation of a man before a woman.
It is tempting
to seek a clinical explanation for his choice of subject matter and to
maintain that Schulz's work merely reflects his fetishistic
inclinations. But the quality of the work transfigures this obsession
and endows it with meaning, while the subject necessarily evokes the
myriad representations devoted to relations between the sexes during the
Symbolist age. Schulz's work began to appear after World War I, at a
time when the Western European public perceived the major preoccupations
of the preceding decades as clichéd and moribund. But given his
treatment of this central Symbolist theme,
Schulz might properly be
regarded as the last great representative of the Symbolist spirit.
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Bruno Schulz
(see collection) |
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Bruno Schulz
The Book of Idolatry
Undula at Night
1920 |
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Bruno Schulz
(see collection)
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Bruno Schulz
The Book of Idolatry
1920
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Dedication (Self-Portrait)
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The Book of Idolatry
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Undula Walks Off into the Night
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The Procession
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The Stallions and the Eunuchs
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Undula the Eternal Ideal
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Beast
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The secular
Story
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Circus
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Infant and Her Clowns
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Revolution in the City
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Sadistic Women
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Two Men at the Feet of a Nude |
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