Names to Czech in the History of Western Art

Vaclav Havel is not the only Czech phenomenon astonishing us tired old democrats of the excessively consumerized West. Saul Bellow’s theme in A Dean’s December—that Americans are prisoners of pleasure whilst the Eastern Europeans are prisoners of pain—is surely confirmed by a Humpty Dumpty communism falling apart before the non-existent legions of John Paul II.
 
The Land of Jan Hus is not, of course, as papist through and through as the turf of Lech Walesa and Our Lady of Czestochova, but religious idealism is surely a major part of the spine-stiffening that got the Easties through four decades of darkness.
 
One of the last things my wife and I did together before we capitulated to divorce 21 years ago was to spend two weeks in Czechoslovakia. We exited four days before the Russian bear pounced on “Socialism with a human face,” thereby destroying my belief in that ideology “once and for all.”
 
I put it that way because when I went to see the Czech modernist photography show recently at the International Center for Photography in Manhattan, I ran into Cornell Capa, the capo of that institution—as well as of socially responsible photography in the 20th Century. I told him of my “permanent” disillusion with socialism. He teased me with a quick “But what about now?”—meaning social democracy may yet be redeemed by the very suffering which socialism’s “enemies” inflicted on the honorable.
 
That fortnight in Czechoslovakia was one of the most radiant in my life: “discovering” in Prague my passion for Jugendstil; a luminous encounter with a folk carver on the funicular up to Strebe Pleso in the High Tatra mountains (his walking stick, mailed to me from Brno after the invasion, remains the best souvenir I’ve ever been given); Koscie, whose glorious cathedral has some images of mine in the Metropolitan Museum’s photo collection; Bardejev Spa, where I first encountered apparatchiks flaunting their clout in a watering hole which had once been the playground for the exploiting wealthy; and Bratislava, where we started schmoozing two young architecture students who took us home so we could watch the evening TV news of the Prague Spring.
 
Strangely, I have no recollection of Czech modernist art during the two weeks, maybe because it was officially out of favor, or maybe because my eyes were so dazzled by the plethora of historical styles (medieval, Baroque, Jugenstil) of surpassing grace.
 
Well, I finally caught up with that amazingly fertile period in the art life of that country at the Brooklyn Museum, where “Czech Modernism: 1900-1945” holds sway through May 7th. Bohumil Kubista (1884-1918) was perhaps the most exciting discovery for me, his cubist (what a nom de chisel!) woodcut “Plea” exemplifying what seems to me the keynote of Czech modernism: the subordination of aesthetic innovations to the service of political, social or religious ideals. I like that: Primary values receive primacy of place.
 
Kubista was an organizer of Osma (“the Eight”), the first modernist movement within the loose rule of overall Czech modernism. Osma lasted only two years, to be replaced by SURSUM (as in the Catholic ejaculation, Sursum Corda—“Let’s lift up our hearts”), which transformed Symbolism into Expression.
 
I also loved Zan Zrzavy’s (1890-1977) “The Good Samaritan,” an oil on canvas, where a stabbed man is getting a pieta treatment. His “Self Portrait in Straw Hat” suggests transvestitism, as does his “Self Portrait as Moroccan.”
 
In February, I had the treat of seeing (at the MOMA of Paris) the first retrospective of allegedly the greatest Czech modernist, Frantisek Kupka, a provincial who came a long, long way from his small town. In Paris he did wonderful satiric covers for Assiette au Beurre (a forerunner of Le Canard Enchaine) that my friend architect Serge Renaudie collects obsessively.
 
Kupka began as an impressionist and symbolist but gained his (temporarily diminished) reputation as an innovator of colorful abstractions. I enjoyed seeing his entire development, but forgive me if I think his illustrations for the magazine and books and posters are his work with the most lasting pull.
 
Which leaves photography, last but surely not least. The International Center for Photography show is most interesting to me for its Dadaist / Surrealist images—and for its advertising photography. The two had a way of cross-fertilizing each other even in the 1920s. I was also struck by the political photography—a kind of Sudetenland Bauhaus, if you know what I mean.
 
Magazines were started to stimulate good design in housing and what the Germans call Siedlungen, or self-contained communities, which they were pioneering in the 1880s in settlements like Siemensstadt, a Berlin neighborhood for workers.
 
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has given its own highly-valued boost to the Czech boom with its retrospective of Josef Sudek, an amateur who achieved professional levels of images in several genres. His spookily surreal images of both architecture and his own window sills are a great pleasure to discover.
 
Which brings me to one of my favorite harps. Our art history agenda has been poisoned not by Eurocentrism (as the Afrocentrists argue), but by covert Kraut-bashing and Eastern Europe-ignoring. Last September in Budapest, I was stunned by the outstanding painters and sculptors I had never even heard of—and I don’t mean Victor Vassarely!
 
Even when I go to a dinky museum like the new one in Vernon (the train stop from Paris for Money’s Giverny), I am amazed at how outrageously we skew our art historical agenda to a few overblown SuperPowers (MOMA’s recent hypertout of Picasso and Braque is an egregious example).
 
There was more good 19th-Century animalier art in Vernon (the French seed their provincial museums with mini-masterpieces) than any kind of art in all of Giverny. I used to think the Academy was an institution you could rely on for perspective. I’ve decided they’re so full of consultants for hire that you’ve just got to get out and look in the other museums in other countries for yourself.
 
All this Czech stuff busting out all over is fine, but it highlights the provincialisms and venalities of our art establishment—like the Gettys getting Alan Bond’s unpaid-for Van Gogh. Heh, get some Czech, you Malibu Midases, and stop flaunting your petro-dollars so crudely. We want to see life steadily and as a whole. Right?
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, May 2, 1990