July 29th – August 2nd, 2016, cont.

STRANGE SHORE: Prague & Vienna

SUNDRY LAND: The Czech Republic & Austria

WANDERING WAY: Na shledanou Prague! Grüß Gott Vienna!

Before I inaugurate a week-long, imperial art tour of Vienna with special attention paid to the Secessionist Gustav Klimt, I’d like to take an hour or two to recount my recent peregrinations around the cobblestone wonderland that is Prague. Even from the briefest of introductions to the Austrian capital over the course of one evening and one morning, I can safely assert that Prague and Vienna are nothing alike. For one, Austrians speak German, which I find it infinitely easier to follow than Czech; for two, Vienna looks like an artist’s daydream of Paris and not like a medieval castle-town that’s been touched up by Baroque, Rococo, Art Nouveau, and Cubist interlopers; for three, Prague is all about beer and trdelnik whereas Austria specializes in coffee, Grüner Veltliner, and cake. In short, it seemed advisable to devote the better part of the morning in recounting my wanderings around Prague before everything gets muddled up in my admittedly messy mind. 

Moreover, Viennese cafes (Café Sperl, pictured below) double as writers' paradises -- the curt yet efficient staff let you sit around all day typing with free Wifi, all for the price of a cup of coffee. Of course, I ordered the plum cake as well... My favorite waiter has already begun referring to his only American regular (me), as "The First Lady."

Prague’s Art Offerings – Um, wow:

Two exhibitions on the works of Alphonse Mucha (@ The Mucha Museum, Gallery of Art Prague); Vital Art Nouveau 1900 (@ The Municipal House); "Czech Cubism 1909 - 1925" (@ The House of the Black Madonna); “Corporeality 1890 – 1921, Munch, Kupka, Kokoschka…” (@ Museum Kampa); and “The Restless Figure: Expression in Czech Sculpture 1880-1914"(@Prague City Gallery)

As I awoke in my paradisiacal AirBnB one morning, I thought to myself, “Hey, why not see some art today?” Like any tourist, I had absolutely no idea what I was proposing. In scanning the helpful little publication “ArtMap”(http://www.artmap.cz/en),  I had the realization that there are so many art galleries and museums scattered throughout the curling streets of Prague that it might take a month to visit all of them. Given this extraordinary if perplexing conundrum, I decided that the most reasonable plan of attack would be to pick an era. 

For no other reason than a singularly pleasant trip to the Mucha Museum (http://mucha.cz/index.phtml?S=home&Lang=EN) early in my visit, I decided that I’d concentrate on exhibitions devoted to fin de siècle Prague, approximately 1890 – 1925. Historically speaking, this choice makes all sorts of sense because those years palpitated with the last heartbeat of The Hapsburg Empire, the rise of Art Nouveau, and a dawning awareness of the horror show that would be The Twentieth Century.

1)Alphonse Mucha – If your fine art career doesn’t work out, try advertising.

Alphonse Mucha is Prague’s homegrown Moravian hero who flew away to Belle Époque Paris to try his hand at advertising since he wasn’t having much luck selling art in Prague, which was still a comparative backwater at the fin de siècle. In his early Parisian years, he hung out with Paul Gauguin and August Strindberg even as he toiled in “cheerful poverty” as a “poorly paid illustrator” (Petr Wittlich, Mucha Museum Catalogue) until he struck gold at the age of thirty-five (just like me!) in designing theatrical posters for Sandra Bernhardt. I had difficulty deciding on my favorite Mucha/Bernhardt poster, and so here are my top two, Médée (1898) and Hamlet (1899):

Apparently, “La divine Sarah” loved Mucha’s serpentine “Snake Bracelet” in the Medée poster so much that she commissioned the master jeweler Georges Fouquet to design an Art Deco model for all of her Medea performances  (http://www.muchafoundation.org/gallery/themes/theme/sarah-bernhardt/object/26 & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Fouquet).

Gosh, it must’ve been awesome to be Sarah Bernhardt…except when she had to have her leg amputated, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Bernhardt).

2) Vital Art Nouveau 1900 – Czech people really, really love Art Nouveau

After my crash course in the oeuvre of Alphone Mucha, it only seemed right to catch the last day of of this exhibition at the spectacular “Municipal House” in Prague:

The Municipal House (built 1906-1912) is itself a triumph of the Art Nouveau movement – Mucha designed the “Lord Mayor’s Hall” and painted murals for its wall and ceiling. As the Lonely Planet Guidebook tells us, the Municipal House is “a lavish joint effort by around 30 leading artists of the day, creating a cultural centre that was the architectural climax of the Czech National Revival.” So to say that the Czech adore Art Nouveau might be an understatement, in fact.

“Vital Art Nouveau 1900” endeavored to display a multimedia panoply of Art Nouveau’s wide-ranging reach with the posters, furniture, fashion, film, and interior decoration falling within the movement’s compass. (As a side note, the curators situate Art Nouveau as an offshoot of the Arts of Crafts Movement in England.)

Again, it’s rather difficult to select a favorite piece considering the scope of the offerings, but I’d say that the Bavarian Franz Hofstätter’s “Mosaic picture of flowers, 1900” and “Mosaic picture of a girl’s head, 1900” – both of which are attributed to the Johann Lötz Witwe glassworks, Kláštersky Mlyn (Klostermühle) located in a Bohemian town in the current-day Czech Republic (http://www.loetz.com/history & http://www.loetz.com/designers/franz-hofstoetter) – convey the movement’s aesthetic as well as its fascination with craft and manufacture. Moreover, each of the mosaics suggests the influence of Mucha, a leading figure of the Czech National Revival in his later years, and the Czech respect for Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Studio.

In addition to being nifty compositions, I particularly esteem how Hofstätter uses the natural variegation within the glass to convey the women's complexions and the organic texture of the vegetation. 

3) "Czech Cubism 1909 - 1925" – It’s not all flowers, oh no. Check out these cubes, folks.

We may all thank Alyssa Meyers who encouraged me to visit this prime example of Cubist architecture in Prague, The House of the Black Madonna.

Cool name, huh? It’s good to know that the Czech can devise better titles than “The Municipal House,” which would've been deemed “Nouveau Flower Dome” if they’d been on their game.

Czech Cubism developed in parallel (and possibly in reaction) to all the emotional and flowery niceties of Art Nouveau. As the exhibition’s placard explains, 

“…strictly orthodox Cubists regarded form alone as the content of the work of art and in their thinking art existed to itself, entirely divorced from any ties with the material work, the variability of phenomena, and the fickleness of human emotions.”

Although “Decorative” proponents of Art Nouveau focused on “style’s form rather than its underlying substance,” overlapping in the theoretical goals of the strict Cubists, it’s obvious that Mucha’s ambition to depict a symbolic personification of the “World Soul” (ibid, Wittlich) might not have garnered many supporters among the form-focused, no-nonsense members either movement.

Without a doubt, this is my favorite Cubist piece, and I only lament that it’s not available for sale at CB2:

4) “Corporeality 1890 – 1921, Munch, Kupka, Kokoschka…” and “The Restless Figure: Expression in Czech Sculpture 1880-1914” – Boy oh boy, the Czech can sculpt.    

Looking back, the palpable power of Czech sculpture shouldn’t have been a giant surprise, given that Prague has sculptures peeking out of every corner, crevice, and nook.

Everywhere you go, sculpture arrests the eye. At the Kampa Museum, Jan Štursa’s sculptures “Puberta – 1905” and “Život uniká (Life is Fleeting) – 1904 -10” stood out amid the otherwise underwhelming “Corporeality 1890 -1921” offerings.

When I asked a well-intentioned but ultimately ineffectual gallery employee for a Štursa monograph, he searched for a solid ten minutes before shaking his head, “No.” Despite this sad outcome, he gave me the helpful hint that the Prague City Gallery was displaying an essential overview of Czech sculpture, “The Restless Figure”( http://en.ghmp.cz/the-restless-figure-expression-in-czech-sculpture-1880-1914/). I sighed in disappointment, but I thought, “Well, maybe the exhibtion’s worth a look-see.”

A look-see. Yes. “The Restless Figure: Expression in Czech Sculpture 1880-1914” turned out to be the most awe-inspiring sculpture exhibition anywhere outside the Villa Borghese in Rome. When I arrived, I was the only non-Czech guest, and I cannot imagine why this exhibition appears to flying under the radar of the omnipresent tourist population when it’s such an impressive testament to the Czech imagination.

Unfortunately, the gallery didn’t allow photography, but here are some representative artists: František Bílek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/František_B%C3%ADlek), Jan Štursa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Štursa), Otto Gutfreund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Gutfreund), Bohumil Kafka (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohumil_Kafka), and Ladislav Šaloun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladislav_Šaloun). Keep in mind, however, these are only a select few of the artists represented in this massive show.

Thank Rodin who propelled a generation of Czech modernists to carve out new modes of expression. As the catalogue relates, “The turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries marked a period of remarkable development in Czech sculpture. Its pinnacle was the creative response in the Prague exhibition of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, held in 1902, after which sculptors were bestowed the right at ingeniousness and the ability to create their own ‘innate artistic morpohology.’”

Ingeniousness, indeed.  

Next time on “Strange and Sundry” – there’s still so much more to stay about Prague! Dvořák chamber music, the sublime Bokovka wine bar, and the anxieties of Franz Kafka. Moreover, there will be a Mozart double-feature, Don Giovanni at the Estates Theatre in Prague & symphonic pieces at the Weiner Musikverein in Vienna. Till then - toodles!