Bohemia; a brief evaluation of Bohemia's contribution to civilization/The Bohemian Art

by Vojta Beneš

Franta Šimon: Bridge Tower in Prague.

The Bohemian Art

By Vojta Beneš

ODERN Bohemian Art is rather young. It came into being with the Bohemian Revival at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. And just as this revival in its other phases, political, commercial and industrial, and at last cultural in the full sense of the word, were weak and groping at first, so also our art grew from insignificant beginnings; and as all the activities of the regenerated nation clung to foreign influences at first, e. g. to the French Revolution, and the humanitarian philosophy of Herder, even so the beginnings of our art grew out of the cosmopolitan, characterless art, which came into Bohemia in its colorless international form from abroad.

And yet there lay in the soul of the Bohemian people immense treasures of the national artistic spirit—treasures of folk art. When in the era of religious expansion of Bohemian Brethren, these modest but rare creators of better Christian life were preserving for the future days their songs and hymnals, they decorated them with drawings, paintings, miniatures and illuminations so perfect in their delicacy, so thoroughly artistic, that to-day we turn back to them with great respect and admiration. This beautiful and in fact brilliant Bohemian Art succumbed to counter-reformation, as indeed did all the Bohemian Culture. Luckily, however, the counter-reformation could not completely destroy the character of the national spirit. In the simple peasant folk there was kept alive the national song with which grew up the national art of the people.

While in the upper strata of the Germanized Society the sense for the old Bohemian Culture was being lost, the Bohemian and Slovak people lived in their reminiscences, dressed in characteristic national dress, decorated their homes with exquisite embroidery, surrounded themselves with furniture of the original, national style, painted Easter Eggs, made original toys for their children, doves, dolls and roosters, steeped their whole lives in poesy, which had its source in their pure souls.

This national ornamental art, this folklore of Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakland, remained forever our pride as well as the mainspring of pure Bohemian Art for all times to come.

When after the fall of the Bohemian Kingdom during the XVII Century the Bohemian intellectuals scattered into all corners of the earth it was the good fortune for the people to live in the heart of the Bohemian Lands as if forgotten and unheeded as to their culture. Deprived of their faith, they were not deprived of their national spirit.

In the art of the common people, in the folk song, and in cherished tradition lived the national spirit gagged and bound, waiting for the moment when the savior would free it from the mediaeval dungeon in which it was chained so cruelly and long.

Then came the French Revolution and humanitarian philosophy which freed the man and nations. Our nation began to live spiritually. Then was the Bohemian Art born. Its beginning was necessarily simple, nor was there anything characteristically Bohemian in it. The Arts Academy of Prague was directed by the Germans in a soulless formalism, without devotion, without enthusiasm. It was more a trade than an art they taught. Religious painting was ossified in commercial religious pictures; landscapes which came from the brushes of painters of those days were not the fruit of the study of nature, but of lifeless phantasy and mechanical theory of combination of colors; historical pictures were hardly more than products of indifferent imagination without regard to the era, costume and local historical color.

At this time, after the first artistic attempts of Jaroslav Čermák and some other painters of Bohemian blood, who began to feel for the real, throbbing Bohemian Art, a man appeared in Bohemia, whose name meant a total revolution in Bohemian Art. This man was Josef Manes, a great student of life and an artist of wonderful qualifications. Like the majority of great men, he, too, was misunderstood in his time, when he preached, with his brush, a return to the people, to life, to nature, and to the human heart. He was a great lyric artist, loving the strong, manly peasant types of his race, sketching and painting them in rythmic lines in their peasant life, in their songs and their sorrows. Especially did he love the child, and his most valuable works are his studies of children. And this it was that made Manes great, his pictures spoke Bohemian language and breathed Bohemian spirit. He found the soul of his nation and sang all its beauty with his brush. His children were truly Slavic children, his peasants were true Bohemian men and his maidens were true Bohemian maidens. They were not Bohemian because Manes clothed them in a Bohemian costume, or in a picturesque Slovak garb, but because they expressed the inner Bohemian or Slovak life and soul, as Manes only knew how to paint them with his brush. Manes studied his people. He lived with them and among them and learned to love them, their customs, their habits, songs, desires, joys and sorrows. And this real and life-loving folk he painted, not any imaginary type. His youths were real Bohemian boys from a certain village or district, its noblest types. Manes’ little children breathed with the music and the joy of childlife—each line spoke as the very youth itself.

The most distinguished work of Manes is a cyclus of paintings, “The Life on a Lord’s Estate”. Perhaps the most important and the greatest work of his life is his world famous “Horologe”, which consists of twelve brilliant illustrations, the inspiration for which he found in the joyous and honest life of our Bohemian peasant folk and with which he helped to adorn so beautifully the historical court house of Prague. In the year of 1871, with Josef Manes was buried in the ancient cemetery at Prague in Vysehrad, the father of modern Bohemian art.

What Manes accomplished in “genre” pictures and figural drawings, Antonín Chittusi, another eminent artist, attained in landscape painting. He was a pupil of the Parisian school, where he learned to paint from nature itself. Up to that time Bohemia had been the home of landscape and romanticism, where the artists had painted and drawn landscape according to their wild fancy, without regard to truth. They were impossible scenes under impossible conditions, untrue and lifeless, wherein nature was misrepresented in fantastic colors. At this time appears young Chittusi and begins to study, understand and love nature as it manifests itself in Bohemian landscapes. His paintings are not made to please but they are true to nature, as one sees Her in Bohemia. Our great vales, fading autumn meadows, our woods bathed in blue mists, villages nestling snugly against the woods and hills, yellow pastures dotted with shepherd fires, all characterize the quiet and simple beauty of a Bohemian landscape.

Julius Mařák, born in east Bohemia, is called the poet of the woods. His realistic landscapes worked in crayons, charcoal, pencil and oil are wonderful; his pen sketches have been sold throughout the whole world. In Bohemia we find but few works of this artist, who painted the Bohemian landscapes with such exhaustive understanding and who found so much beauty in Nature. His woods in crayon are alive with a riot of vibrations of light, they murmur, rustle and echo with songs of the birds. He painted our mountains, the Krkonoše, then he painted the Alps and from his hands there emerged that splendid work called “Sylvan Aspects.” It contains thirty-three paintings which are really songs of the brooks, the woods, its torrents and waterfalls. His pupil is Ferdinand Engelmüller, the poet of the quiet, sunny Elbe, and broad plains through which it winds. For years he was seen roaming through the woods, along the river, wandering through the meadows, drinking in their moods and colors into his soul, which he afterward transferred with pastel, charcoal, and oil to paper and canvas; far stretching vistas of the plain of the river Elbe, secluded spots with quiet chapels, groups of giant trees with river plains, sunshine and shadows on the green lowlands—these were always no other than Bohemian landscapes.

Václav Brožík became famous through his numerous historical canvases. His celebrated picture “Hus before the Council of Constance” is the property of the Bohemian nation and adorns the walls of the ancient court house of Prague; another large picture “Columbus Before the Spanish Queen Isabella”, is kept in the Metropolitan Art Museum of New York.

The paintings of Felix Jenevain are famous for their deep religious spirit and the magnificence with which he paints his figures. His work is characterized by the superb lines in the bodies of his figures, simplicity in color, style and conception, and the depth of feeling. The religious Middle Ages, with their deep religious fervor are powerfully treated in his work of which the most noted is the emotionally powerful cyclus “The Plague”.

Vojtěch Hynajs, the painter of the curtain at the National Theatre at Prague, is a depictor of joyous childhood scenes. He was as excellent a painter as he was a teacher.

The Bohemian National Theatre also possesses the works of J. Ženíšek, one of Manes’ greatest pupils. His pictures are lyric in expression, full of ryhthmic lines and a delicate sense for the figural beauty of the healthy human body. His many allegorical works are as easily understood as our simple melodious national song. F. X. Harlas, the Bohemian art critic, correctly says of him: “A beautiful human body means to him what it meant to Manes: the glory of the human race.”

Mikuláš Aleš, the most characteristically Bohemian and most beloved of the Bohemian artists, was born in 1852, in the poor Southeastern part of Bohemia. Although Manes’ art, in spite of its Bohemianism and Slavism, might be classed as international, Aleš’ art itself can only be classed as typically Bohemian. He simply cannot be understood by the foreign world; other nations cannot realize what a gift from above this blessed genius was to his nation. It is he who warms the Bohemian heart.

Aleš improved upon Manes in his portrayal of the Bohemian-Slovak type. His type of the peasant, his Hussite warrior, “the defender of the word of God”, and his type of the Bohemian child, with which he illustrates the Bohemian song, is not merely an illustration, it is a3 song in itself, breathing the spirit of the Bohemian mothers, the Bohemian meadows and the Bohemian history, voicing the joys of the harvest and Christmas as the yearning Bohemian soul feels them. He worked with pen and pencil, illustrating thousands of our songs, proverbs, sayings, folk tales and hundreds of our Bohemian books which are typical of the national spirit. Of the people he was born, of the people and for the people he sang. Probably no nation possesses an artist as fortunate as Aleš was, in the fact that he became the real property, pride and joy of the people in the broadest sense. Aleš is a national Bohemian artist.

Mikuláš Aleš: Kuneš from Bělovic, Captain of Taborites.

He loved Slovaks warmly. In his work is mirrored the dreamy and melancholy soul of the Slovak, with all the joys and sorrows of the life of that good but unhappy race. The gentle Slovak song played upon the most beautiful strings of his big heart and charmed from his pen most precious art.

The history of Bohemia, its bright and dark sides, the great Hussite period, Aleš portrays through his illustrations as masterfully as Palacký did in his great history and Jirásek in his historical novels. And yet Aleš is not an historical artist in the full sense of the word. He never painted big and ostentatious historical canvases that would dazzle the eye. He illustrated great literary works, fictional and historical, and in his illustrations depicted the past of the Bohemian people in a direct and simple way, that gripped the heart.

There is not a child in the land of the Bohemians and the Slovaks that does not know Aleš. His sketches of children, soldiers, horses and cows, and the joys and other phases of child-life are the Bohemian child’s constant companions. No one in the whole world but Aleš could draw for the Bohemian child horses and soldiers and the joy of life and youth.

Another wonderful Bohemian artist is Hanuš Schwaiger. He is of Dutch descent on his mother’s side and his works show a harmonious blending of both the Bohemian and Dutch blood.

Southern Bohemia is a land of dreamy ponds and swampy meadows. Folk-lore has woven about them magnificent tales and legends about the water-kings and other mysterious beings of the woods, mountains and waters. This fairy world Schwaiger depicted. He depicted it with such brilliant imagination, with so great an understanding of the soul of the common folk, that one cannot help being transported into the charmed atmosphere which rises before his eyes like an enchanted, distant, strange and yet as if a real world.

Schwaiger studied nature even in the land of his Dutch ancestors, bringing into Bohemia a bountiful, artistic harvest: old fish markets, the life at Dutch ports, landscapes in which the clouds hang low, in short, that atmosphere which gave birth to the old Dutch masters. The influence of his sojourn in Holland was shown in his work immediately on his return to Bohemia. Schwaiger learned to love the Bohemian people through his own study of their soul and mode of life. He goes to Moravia among the rough and simple Slovaks and depicts them in the midst of their hard, rough toil and pictures the happy side of their life of work and thrift. The figures in his pictures have about them a certain quaint, rugged but healthful humor. Schwaiger’s art is likewise rugged, energetic, full of strength.

Jaroslav Panuška created works of incomparable humor and wonderful imagination. His decayed willows, glittering with ghostly lights, his spectres, his haunted mills, his witches, his national strong men, his robber and peasant huts in the woods, his ruined fairy castles, adorn the pages of many famous literary works for Bohemian children.

But one of the greatest of the Bohemian artists, who found his inspiration in the soul of his people, is the Moravian Slovak, Jóža Úprka. Disgust with the artificiality of city life brought him back to the good Slovak peasantry. In a quiet retreat in southern Moravia, he lived simply with his beloved country-folk, depicting their soul and their daily life. His paintings are passionate songs of color, light, youth and strength and joy of life; they are passionate paeans of the hot southern Moravian sun and the healthy vigorous people of that wonderful land. His typical peasant figures; his gray-haired pious country patriarchs; his country maidens in their Slovak costumes with their riot of magnificent colors; his dreamy autumnal meadows with their fires and šohaji^[1]; his huts with painted entrances; his national pilgrimages to cathedrals; sacred spots; his mowers wet with the morning dew; his laborers wet with the sweat of toil; his šohaji on horseback on holidays; the peasantry in song, dance, work, prayer without want, tears or sorrow in their happy moods, manifesting their happy life: these were the things clothed in his exulting colors which conquered the European world of Art, when in its lists appeared this young strong barbarian—Úprka.

The inspiration of Úprka is the strength and energy in the life of his Slovaks, with their beautiful, unpolluted lives, their healthful and joyous souls, with which they really created their great master, whose art but recently dazzled all Europe.

Úprka paints his beloved Slovaks just as he finds them; at work in the fields, at rest, on their way home in the ligth of the setting sun, in church in religious revery, in landscape full of the scent of blossoming meadows and ripening crops, picturing them always in gentle but happy colors, mirroring their mild Slovak soul. That, however, which really conquered the art world for Úprka, is his revelry in colors, with which he makes the Slovak landscapes of Southern Moravia actually sing and rejoice.

Adolf Kašpar followed in the footsteps of Manes and Aleš. His German education did not succeed in making him forget his Bohemian origin, or crushing the Bohemian-Slovak spirit. His paintings and sketches show his Bohemianism so strongly that he is indeed a true successor to the national fame that Manes and Aleš attained. In him, too, the Bohemian song and Bohemian books found a splendid illustrator, though he won his fame as the creator of fine etchings. His illustrations for the exquisite edition of the famous novel “Babička”, written by Božena Němcová, in which one of the greatest among Bohemian women pictures charmingly the life of the Bohemian village folk, are worthy of their place in the great book.

The more noted of the young Bohemian artists are Jan Preisler whose paintings portray various moods of Nature and are characterized by rich colors and a certain dreamy, mysterious, indescribable charm. With him ranks Hugo Boetinger, a refined portrait painter, František Šimon, a creator of wonderful etchings, nurtured in Paris and known also in American art circles, Jakub Obrovský, a Moravian artist of deep penetration.

In the European world of art, the portrait painter, Max Švabinský, won great fame. He is a professor at the Academy of arts in Prague. His pen and brush produced a whole line of portraits of great men of our nation, each portrait being in itself a work of a perfect artist. Švabinský is acknowledged by the European art world a master in his line; England especially valued his wonderful works in art. His portraits mirror the soul and character of the great men they represent; they mirror their endeavor and work which made them great. His masterly portrait of our great composer Bedřich Smetana, his portraits of Rieger, Masaryk, Aleš, Manes, Neruda, and a great line of others are the most perfect of all that have ever been produced by the brush of Bohemian portrait painters. Švabinský excelled also as a master of color. One of his gěnre canvases, a great work of art, was bought for America. It was the painting named “At the Loom”, but most unfortunately, it was destroyed by fire at the recent earthquake in San Francisco, an irreparable loss to the art world.

A unique place among Bohemian artists is held by František Kupka and Emil Holárek. Their life, like all of their art, is consecrated to the struggle for truth and democracy. Kupka’s brush flays European art of the present day while Holárek’s work assails the lust for gold, brutal militarism and mercenary ecclesiasticism. Today two unconquerable social forces, capital and the state and its church under military organization are waging a great struggle against the people who physically, mentally and materially bear the world on their shoulders. Kupka and Holárek stand unquestionably on the side of democracy. Kupka, in all his activity in art circles, in all his daring sketches, a master of penetrating satire, attacks social immorality, hypocrisy, the selfishness and greed of capital, and religious phariseism. His cartoons aroused great interest in art circles of Paris, and Elisé Reklus requested Kupka to illustrate his famous work “The Man and the Earth.” When the present war broke out he lived in Paris. Though a Bohemian and a stranger, he went to France to fight with his sword in the struggle for democracy. His most noted works in art are his cycli: “Money” “Religion” “Peace” and “Defiance.”

Beside Kupka stands the humanitarian philosopher, Emil Holárek. His art work is not as daring as Kupka’s, It is more Slavic in that it is gentler, softer. He draws his inspiration from history and from the humanitarian spirit of the Bohemian Brethren. The title page on his work “Thoughts on the Catechism” beautifully expresses the idea which was the foundation for this excellent contribution to art: a man hides behind the mask of Christ. He thus characterizes the pseudo-Christian Society of today against which he directed his art.

The limited space of this study precludes even mentioning a whole list of celebrated names. Rudolf Bém, the delicate Victor Stretti, the poet of the sea Beneš Knüpfer; the genius in decorative art, who awakened the sincere interest of France and the United States, Alfons Mucha, and a whole list of other young artists, whose lines are being thinned by death on the battlefields where Austria is driving them with other great men of the Bohemian nation all these constituted the hopeful army, which promised its nation a brilliant future in art.

One of the artists, now deceased, whose name blazed its way through France into the world was Luděk Marold. The wonderful facility with which he created his exquisite interpretation of modern Paris with all the elegance of its beautiful women, opened for him the way to the world of art. He wrote his name indelibly on the hearts of his own countrymen by his pictorial panorama of the great national tragedy “The Battle of Lipany” where national Hussite democracy was crushed by the combined reactionary forces, foreign and native.

The Bohemian landscape, its refined beauty, is the contribution of the brush of Antonín Hudeček. Sweet, subdued shadows and lights of lonely brooks in the woods, the flocks slowly returning home from their pastures, the open country in the sun and in the storm: those are the subjects he glories in.

The greatest landscape painter without a doubt was Antonín Slavíček. However, just at the time when he was about to blossom into an artist such as Bohemia perhaps never had before, he was torn from our midst by sudden death. There was nothing in Nature on which he would not try his talents. The entrancing beauty of Prague was never depicted with such deep appreciation as when he painted it. The majestic Gothic of the Cathedral of St. Vitus he comprehended not only by his eyes but by his big artistic soul. He painted with passionate devotion the home of the Hussites, the poor county of Tabor, which is so unyielding to the plowman, but which was the only corner of the earth in which the heroic Hussite hetmans could have been born. He was the painter of the soul of his native land.

Many tried to follow his footsteps; one of the best is the gentle, sentimental Alois Kalvoda, who loves equally the Bohemian and Slovak landscape: the groups of white birches, brooks winding among alders, long vistas of the picturesque Bohemian and Slovak country.

At the Wentworth Institute engaged as one of the professors is Vojtěch Pressig. He is known for his beautiful colored etchings, which breathe indescribable poesy and vibrate with beautiful color chords. He did some of his best work in his illustration of the juvenile classic “Broučci” (The Fire-Flies). Under his leadership was published the excellent album of the Bohemian Artists in the United States which was their contribution to the fight for freedom of their people.

As Josef Manes was the first real Bohemian painter, so Václav Levý was the first real Bohemian sculptor. His works were mainly religious and many of them are to be found in the art collection in the Vatican at Rome. His sculpture in the sandstone rocks of Kokořín near Prague, are wonderful. Here in the open he hewed these shapeless rock masses into exquisite forms, on themes from the Greek mythology and Bohemian history. Unfortunately, he lived in an era when his great talent could not assert itself in such a way as could that of Jos. Vác. Myslbek, who appeared later. Myslbek was the first Bohemian professor of sculpture at the art academy of Prague. With his art he decorated Palacký Bridge and the exterior of the Bohemian National Theatre in Prague. His hands fashioned the statue of the great Hussite leader Jan Žižka of Trocnov, the monument of St. Václav, the national hero of the Bohemian people, the statue of the poet Mácha and many other works. His art was strong, full of life, magnificent in form and spirit.

Ladislav Šaloun is the creator of the great historical monument of Jan Hus, our national saint and martyr for liberty, democracy and pure Christianity. The monument of Hus is cast in bronze, and stands in the old town square of Prague, that historic spot which was the witness to the glory and the downfall of our nation. Here stands the great reformer in all his majesty, like a rugged peasant, severe to himself and others, yearning after a true Christian life, simple and deeply in earnest as the people and the country that gave him birth. The statue is the work of a great artist and a true Bohemian. In it the artist embodied for his nation the ideal of true Bohemianism and erected a monument not only of great beauty but of everlasting glory.

During the present war another beloved Bohemian artist died at Prague, Stanislav Sucharda, a son of northeastern Bohemia. His most beautiful work is the magnificent monument of the “Father of the Nation” the Bohemian historian, František Palacký. It is hewn out of granite to symbolize the granite character of the man and the enduring work of the historian. The historical groups cast in bronze, represent in a figurative way, certain events of Bohemian history. Nearly the whole life of the artist was spent in study for this work. The result is most assuredly worth the labor and the thought of a lifetime.

From Myslbek’s school there came a line of younger artists. These invariably went to Paris to complete their artistic development in the school of the great master Rodin; Constantin Meunier, the celebrated sculptor also exerted an influence on the younger Bohemian scupltors. Of these, those who grew up to be really strong artists were Jan Štursa, the deep, realistic Bohumil Kafka, the excellent pupil of Rodin, Josef Mařatka, the creator of fine plaques, Otokar Španiel, Ladislav Kofránek and Jos. Šejnost. Franta Úprka, brother of the painter, Jóža Úprka, presents to us his dear Slovaks in bronze, gypsum and other media.

Frant. Bílek is an artist of unusual individuality, a type entirely by himself. He also is a son of southern Bohemia, the cradle of Hussite enthusiasm and of the faith of Bohemian Brethren. The spirit of these deep, religious thinkers of the Bohemian nation comes to life again in Bílek’s art. His artistic soul is gentle, dreamy, his nature poetical. His deep and philosophically expressive works in wood, metal, marble, clay and gypsum are the embodiment of the purest Christianity and harmony of faith and love. His great works in religious representation brought Bílek many enthusiastic admirers. His most famous works are Golgotha, Agriculture, Christ, Moses, The Bitter Taste of Earth, The Allegory of the Fall of Bohemia, Hus, The Blind.

Although the ancient Bohemian architecture reveals itself throughout Bohemia in such exquisite forms as to constitute a veritable architectural art museum, our modern architecture did not have favorable conditions for its growth. In spite of this it can point to many beautiful accomplishments. Our architects, Schulz and Zítek, erected in Prague and elsewhere many buildings in the style of the modern Renaissance, such as the Bohemian National Theatre, the Museum at Prague, etc.

Among our modern artists the name of Jan Kotěra has become famous. He is a professor of architecture at the Polytechnical Institute of Prague, the designer of the plans for the new Bohemian University which, however, the Austrian Government, unfriendly to the Bohemian people, did not build.

The Moravian architect, Dušan Jurkovič, gets the inspiration for his work from the architectural spirit of the common folk, and the style of the Bohemian and Slovak peasantry. His architectural works express the national style and preserve the exquisite types and products of the people’s architectural art.

Of great significance for the modern growth of Bohemian Art are the recently organized “Modern Arts Gallery for Bohemia” and the society of Bohemian artists called “Manes”, through the efforts of which our Bohemian art has made most satisfactory progress during the last few years.

We can say with pride today that our Bohemian art, though young, is worthy of any cultured nation.

---

1. Slovak youths.