Prague and Cubism

The Cubist art movement emerged from Paris in the early 20th century. It revolutionised painting and the visual arts, and influenced many other art forms. The idea and artistic principles of Cubism were immediately influential across Europe. This blog will explore how Czech artists embraced the new, revolutionary art movement Cubism.

What is Cubism?

In Paris, between 1907 and 1917, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso initiated the Cubist art movement, which was centred around the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Indépendants in 1911.

Through their experiments, they sought to reduce an object to its simple mental projection by completely turning away from its visual perception. By doing this, they came close to abstraction, in which the subjects of their still-lifes blend into the background and appear almost unrecognisable - unless you see the few clues left by the artists.

Prague artists before World War I

In 1902, at the Modern Gallery, created by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Habsburg in Prague, the multiple cultural identities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were reflected during the creation of the collections.

On the one hand, German-speaking curators organised their collections around German and Nordic Expressionist influences, while on the other hand, Czech curators were concentrating on more traditional national artists from the movements of the previous century.

As the Modern Gallery was widely criticised for this, private galleries and other associations decided to showcase the Czech avant-garde, such as the cubists Bohumil Kubišta or Otto Gutfreund.

The Mánes Association of Fine Artists was founded in Prague in 1887. It gradually became the exhibition centre par excellence for modern Czech and European artists.

Over time, the association's members included foreign artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as architects like Le Corbusier. As a member of the Mánes Association, the architect Pavel Janák first theorised, in 1911, the founding principles of Czech Cubism in his article ‘The Prism and The Pyramid’.

Bohumil Kubišta, Antonín Procházka and Emil Filla, with five other painters, created the avant-garde artistic association Osma - known as 'The group of the ‘Eight’ - that operated between 1905 and 1910.

Osma definitively changed Prague's artistic landscape. It broke away from the tradition of the School of Fine Arts, transgressing the separate identities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and took inspiration from art in other countries. Osma organised exhibitions in Prague and later exhibited their artworks abroad, like Filla and Procházka in Cologne, Munich or Berlin.

Long influenced by the Nordic Expressionist schools, such as Edvard Munch, and the German movements, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, the artists from the Mánes Association and Osma also looked westwards and organised exhibitions around Parisian artists.

Bohumil Kubišta

Bohumil Kubišta (1884-1918) is one of the founders of Czech modern art. He studied in the Academy of Fine Arts of Prague but left the school, in 1906, to study in Florence, Italy.

Like many artists of his time, Bohumil Kubišta was first deeply influenced by an Edvard Munch exhibition organised in Prague in 1905.

Although he produced Cubist paintings as early as 1910, he started working as an Expressionist painter, focusing his work on colours.

He carried on these colour experiments while being a Cubist artist. This created a distinction with the Parisian Cubist artists. However, he shared with George Braque a passion for Paul Cézanne and his depiction of geometrical patterns.

Antonín Procházka

Antonín Procházka (1882-1945) travelled across Europe in 1907 and 1908. He initially worked with Expressionism before moving on to Cubism, which he represented at the Berlin Salon d'Automne in 1913.

He was a member of the Mánes and Osma, but eventually left the Mánes in 1911 to join Skupina výtvarných umělců (The Group of Fine Artists), another association of Cubist artists that succeeded Osma between 1911 and 1917.

Emil Filla

Emil Filla (1882-1953) was one of the most active members of the Mánes association and one of the precursors of Cubism in Prague. He produced Cubist sculptures and paintings from 1910. He moved to Paris before World War I and returned to Prague just after 1918.

Like Picasso and Braque, he was interested in non-European art, and his artworks are particularly influenced by African sculpture.

Czech Cubism in decorative arts

In decorative arts, the Artel institution, founded in Prague in 1908, focused on making functional and decorative everyday objects. Later, the organisation expanded to designing entire interior spaces, as did the Bauhaus in Germany.

During its existence, it saw the emergence of the Art Nouveau, Art Deco and above all Cubist movements, with Vlastislav Hofman and Pavel Janák (a Czech architect who studied at the school in Vienna) as its standard-bearers. The objects feature 'broken' shapes, with the aim of energising the concept of space.

Czech Cubist architecture

Prague's Cubist architecture has left unparalleled examples. Architects of the Mánes association designed many features of the city, such as Josef Gočár, Josef Chochol and Emil Králíček, with his Diamant house and famous street lamp. Chochol designed buildings in Prague's Vyšehrad district that are considered to be masterpieces of Cubist architecture.

Although this movement was short-lived (1918-1925), it was so intense that it was given the name Rondocubism, which today refers only to architecture in Prague.

After World War I and during the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), Prague was considered as one of Europe’s capitals of modern art.

In 1926, under pressure from the modern art world, the Czech government decided to exhibit, at the Modern Gallery, French artists such as Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, le Douanier Rousseau, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

The collection was acquired in 1923 and can still be seen today at the National Gallery in Prague alongside their Prague modernist contemporaries such as the artists featured in this blog.