Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/48

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Before the great French Impressionists reached Prague, their successors—Besnard, Harrison, Amant-Jean, Henri Martin—were known in our capital. Nor was it long before the great masters themselves came into the public eye. The visits of our young artists to Paris grew more numerous, and their contact with French artists more direct. The “Mánes” association pursued an unflagging propaganda. The Free Tendencies issued reproductions of Manet, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, Rops, Forain, Willette, translations of Huysmans and Mourey and original articles by Camille Mauclair and Charles Morice. The jingoes, it is true, at the instigation of a coterie of artists who saw in this propaganda a menace to their feeble “national” production, raised an outcry against the invasion of Bohemia by foreign art: as a result, the exhibitions were poorly attended, and ended up with a deficit. But the devotees of French art did not let themselves be discouraged, and thanks to them the year 1902 may even be called epoch-making. To their unbounded delight, they were able to open in that year, in the handsome pavilion which the architect Jan Kotěra had built specially for the occasion, the first exhibition outside Paris of Auguste Rodin’s magnificent work. The great sculptor himself came to Prague, and received from its citizens a royal welcome. After this, an exhibition of paintings brought within our purview, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Carrière, Puvis, Maurice Denis, Maufra, d’Espagnat and others. But as the great impressionist masters were inadequately represented, every effort was made to get specimens of their work, and in 1908, Prague saw Daumier, Boudin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassat, Raffaëlli, the genre-painters, Bonnard, Vuillard and Laprade, the neo-impressionists, Signac and Cros, and the three inaugurators of a new art: Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Of all the exhibitions held by the “Mánes” Society