2024-03-28 01:11:24
The middle class is on the rise, but the country is divided by burning social problems, national disputes and the clash between the left and the right about the next direction. The visual art of interwar Czechoslovakia contains the optimism of modern life and, for today’s viewer, a premonition of impending disaster.
Curators Anna and Ivo Habán confirm the first impression of the exhibition entitled Nové realismy: Modern realistic approaches on the Czechoslovak art scene 1918 to 1945, which can now be seen in the Prague Municipal Library.
“The modern realism of the 1920s was an effort to bring art closer to people with a quick shortcut, such as we know today from the news, for example. To go straight to the point without a long explanation and to be understandable even to the masses,” explains art historian Ivo Habán, one aspect of the works of authors whose native language was Czech , German, Slovak and Hungarian and the common denominator of realistic tendencies in creation.
You can listen to the New Realism exhibition podcast here:
“At the exhibition, one will see the modern life of the time, the clatter of typewriters and heels, beautiful ‘backpack’ shoes, raspberry lipsticks, portraits and still lifes where German-speaking authors will be confronted with Czech ones, which means that Richard Schrötter will be exhibited alongside Jan Zrzavý.” adds art historian Anna Habánová. A contemporary of the well-known Czech painter Zrzavý, a native of Přerov from the German-Jewish Schrötter family, he fled from the Nazis to Australia in 1939. He died there in 1955.
“We are not trying to break down the story of classic Czech modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, as we know it from museums and exhibitions, but to fill in its blind spots,” continues Habán. “We put Jan Zrzavý, Otto Gutfreund or Miloslav Holý in the context of the time, as a citizen could see them next to each other in Czechoslovakia at the time, but not in one place. Czechs, Slovaks and Czech Germans never exhibited together, unfortunately this was not possible at the time, ” mentions Habánová.
The guests of the podcast are art historians Ivo and Anna Habán. | Photo: Václav Vašků
The story of the girl from the poster inviting to the exhibition is telling in this regard. The oil on canvas called Portrait of Hildegard dates from 1931. It was borrowed from the city gallery in Freital, Saxony, although its history leads to Teplice in North Bohemia.
“We don’t know who Hildegard was,” comments Habánová about the mysterious girl. The picture was painted by Heribert Fischer-Geising. He studied in Dresden and spent a large part of his life in Teplice. The nickname Geising was given to the town, which is adjacent to Teplice on the other side of the Ore Mountains. The artist had part of his family there.
“This is one of the authors who will be presented in the Czech Republic for the very first time. Exhibitions in Teplice in the interwar period were organized by Emma Meisel, a Jewish woman who decided in the early 1930s that she would uplift the city. Her story was ultimately tragic, but she was able to Teplice to get the most modern from the German environment of the former Czechoslovakia. Thanks to individuals, the multicultural environment intersected in one place. Hildegard’s painting belonged to this environment,” adds Anna Habánová.
It is the tragic story of Teplice’s cultural driving force that foreshadows the end of multicultural Czechoslovakia; while telling it, the curator’s voice breaks and she bursts into tears. “Emma Meisel was a teacher at the girls’ high school in Teplice. As a Jew, she was able to create a cultural and artistic environment in which a wide range of visual arts was presented after 1933, even in a radicalized German-Czech environment,” she adds. Emma Maisel died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. She was 57 years old.
The story associated with Košice will be equally unknown to a wider audience. “It was not the far east, but an artistic center. At that time, contact was made possible by the railway,” points out Ivo Habán about the cultural capital of eastern Czechoslovakia.
It was in Košice that many Hungarian avant-gardists found asylum after the fall of the Hungarian Republic, the Council, which was a temporary state entity that existed for part of 1919. Among them also Sándor Bortnyik or Gejza Schiller, whose works can now be seen at the Prague exhibition.
As for the unknown art of the former Czechoslovakia, the curator mentions the Slovak painter Edmund Gwerk as a possible visitor discovery. The author with German and Hungarian roots lived and created on the Štiavnické hills, in the central Slovak mountains, outside the cultural centers. “He can be the counterpart of American regionalists such as Grant Wood. Like them, Gwerk stubbornly follows his own path, his realism is not connected to the city, the car and the telephone,” Habán compares.
Because of this, the curators who live in Liberec even went to the Midwest of the USA to investigate similar artistic expressions. “However, while the American regionalists are exhibited in the Art Museum in Chicago as its biggest attractions, to which visitors come from all over the world, the regionalists from northern Bohemia or Štiavnické vrchy are still waiting to be discovered,” states Ivo Habán in reference to Czechoslovak art, which the exhibition He discovers new realisms. On the second floor of the Municipal Library on Prague’s Mariánské náměstí, it will last until August 25.
Welcome to the Na dotek podcast. The guests of Petr Vizina are art historians Anna and Ivo Habán. To listen on the platforms: Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spreaker.