The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 2/Fine Arts in Bohemia (6)

by Jaroslav Egon Salaba-Vojan

Fine Arts in Bohemia.

By Dr. J. E. S. Vojan.

(Continued)

 

Of other Bohemian artists whose talent blossomed out through the influence of Paris the greatest are Chittussi, Hynais, Marold, Mucha and Kupka.

Antonin Chittussi is the first modern Czech landscape painter. His Italian name indicates that some ancestor of his came to Bohemia from Italy and became a Czech. Antonin was born in Ronov in 1847. After graduating from the middle school he entered the Prague Polytechnic, but in 1866 he left the Technical School and enrolled in the Painters’ Academy; later he went to Munich where he was the pupil of Anschutz, then to Vienna and back to Prague. He left the Prague Academy in 1875 with a number of fellow-students as a protest against the gross insult of the Czech people by Professor Woltmann. He rented an atelier with Frank Ženíšek, but the occupation of Bosnia put him into the military uniform and dragged him to the south. After a discharge from the army service in 1879 he went to Paris and there for the first time found himself. Up to this time he was occupied with historical paintings, never dreaming that a rare landscape artist was hidden in his soul. The modern French school of landscape painting opened his eyes. After the classical period which had filled imaginary vistas with antique temples and chapels bordered by beautiful trees right and left and hills and groves rolling in the background, and after the period of new romanticism which again demanded castles and ruins and picturesqueness of scenes came the modern masters who smashed tradition and fashion and forbad the painting of immaginary landscapes. They declared that a painter should put down on canvass the real scene, as he sees it through his own eyes and his individual temperament, that a painter should infuse his soul and his feelings into his immediate concepts. Thus impression becomes the main thing and a landscape must be expressed by fluttering tones.

Since 1880 when his first paintings “A scene on the Elbe” and “An evening in the neighborhood of Barbizon” received merited success in the Paris Salons, Chittussi devoted himself exclusively to landscapes and created a number of splendid paintings, based partly on what he had seen in France and partly in Bohemia. Veiled harmonies of forest and sweet melancholy of great silences of fields and meadows together with dreamy pools are the kingdom of his poems in paint. In France he makes us see the delightful coquetry of the banks of the Seine and Oise, the mystery of the forest of Fontainebleau, the bitter roughness of Bretagne; in Bohemia he looks upon the central Bohemian plains, he depicts the banks of the Elbe and the ponds of Southern Bohemia all in a clear sonorous and natural diction, accessible to every heart open to sincere feelings. In 1891 this first modern landscape painter died at Vinohrady, a suburb of Prague.

Vojtěch Hynais was born in Vienna December 14, 1853. While at the Vienna Academy he became the favorite pupil of Anselm F. Feuerbach, the first really modern Austrian artist. In 1874 he received the Rome fellowship and after he came back was granted the State traveling stipendium. That enabled him to live in Paris for a number of years. Of French masters Baudry had the greatest influence upon him by his decorative talent. Hynais is the delicate poet of the sweet beauty of the female body, and only Max Švabinský of the later artists, can equal him. Of his main works one must mention the curtain of the National Theatre in Prague and panels along the marble stairway leading to the royal section in the National Theatre (Apotheosis of the lands of the Bohemian Crown, Peace, History and Idylls) and in the blue boudoir of the royal box (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter), and paintings in the Court Theatre in Vienna.

In 1893 he became together with Brožík professor at the Prague Academy of Painting. His beautiful picture “The judgment of Paris” called forth a stormy criticism from the Prague clericals, just as recently Polášek’s “Sower” stirred up the false shame of Chicago’s hypocrites.

Luděk Marold commenced his brief life of 33 years on the 7th day of August, 1865, in Prague. The following year his father, a major in the army, fell in war with Prussia and his mother with an aunt undertook to bring up the boy, who since his earliest childhood had kept on drawing. At the age of 15 he was enrolled in the Academy of Painting. In 1887 he came back to Prague from Munich and the following year he created a sensation by his picture “From the Egg Market”. It is now in the Rudolfinum Gallery. I may say that I was born in this very street and have lived in this characteristic corner of old Prague before the street was demolished by the erection of the City Market; I can state that the painting is an excellent representation of the real scene. Incidentally, this was the first perfect picture of Prague streets, clear and with the right atmosphere. Even then Marold was making ready to go to Paris, where the fairy blossom of his talent burst open and gave out an intoxicating perfume. Now with a feverish activity his hand produced thousands of those delicious drawings, aquarelles, gouachos, etc., that filled the Paris newspapers and illustrated weeklies, novels and short stories, the Munich “Fliegende Blaetter” and the Prague “Zlatá Praha” (Golden Prague) and various other books. Paris cheered him, being bewitched that he, a foreigner, should so bring out the charm of the Parisienne.

Mádl well says: “Marold became the artistic reporter of elegance, charm, coquetry, attractiveness and chic of the daughters of the French metropolis; he was their devoted page, and his eyes thirstily drank in their lines, stroked their soft hair, slender waists, small feet; his ear caught the least rustlings of their silks, every exciting sound of their satin slippers. With these he filled his drawings and aquarelles. In them he deposited the results of his passionately hot observation and in them he noted down their physiology with a style of which only the greatest modern French artists are masters.” What Maupassant, Prevost, Mirabeau and others expressed by word, Marold caught by drawing. If you will, for instance, take the splendid pictures that for three years appeared in the “Fliegende Blaetter” and later came out collectively in a special album,—an unfailing charm breathes upon you. They were all of them Marold’s own conception and the Munich editor merely added the appropriate humorous text. Everything in them is real life, nature and truth—nothing stiff, nothing unreal, no imitation. Two great albums of Marold’s works publishe din Prague fill the soul of the Czech student over and over again with pity that such a splendid talent should have been carried away so soon.

Marold died in Prague December 1, 1898. Of his other works one must mention his gigantic panorama “The Battle of Lipany, May 30, 1434”, painted for the engineering exhibition of 1898. Upon this canvas, measuring 1,362 square meters, Marold created with the help of Hilšer, Jansa, Rešek, Štapfr and Vacátko, a monumental memorial of that sorrowful day which saw the fulfillment of Emperor Sigismund’s words, that “Bohemians can be defeated by Bohemians only.”

Alfonso Maria V. Mucha was born in Ivančice in Moravia in 1860. When we spoke of Aleš we mentioned that in July, 1886 the Munich Society of Czech Artists “Škréta”, under the chairmanship of Mucha sent to Aleš a diploma of honorary membership drawn by Marold at the very time when every one was dragging Aleš down. Later Mucha travelled through Italy and Germany and returned to Moravia where at the castle of Count Khuen he painted thirty pictures for the castle gallery, a history of costumes, and sport of all period of all nations. Thence he went to Paris. A piece of good fortune, so important a factor in the lives of artists in a great city, came to his assistance. When the Renaissance Theatre in 1895 was staging the “Gismonde” with Sarah Bernhardt, Mucha was asked to draw a big poster for this play. The poster made Mucha famous over night. Since that moment Mucha took Paris by storm. The only analogy to this instantaneous success that I can think of is found in the musical field, namely the conquest of England by Dvořák. The refined French taste was pleased by the softened tones of splendidly harmonized colors, by the new shades breathed in such a delicate manner upon Mucha’s lithographs (affiches), by his original novelty of decorative curves, by his astonishing employment of plant material for every new ornamentation, by his soft and wonderfully natural poses of the belles that in spite of sweet fatigue were yet full of life, by his occasional use of the exotic Byzantine mosaic background. All this called forth instantly such an interest that no Czech artist has been given as much attention in publications devoted to art as Mucha. Let me just mention an example, four issues of the well-known literary and artistic publication of Paris “La Plume” which devoted in the summer of 1897, four issues entirely to Mucha and later published them in a special volume. From 1896 on these few Paris years of Mucha’s were filled out with an almost astonishing amount of work. Mucha sent out thousands of drawings from his workshop in the street Val de Grace, a place that was a veritable conservatory revealing by the wealth of its blooms, whence Mucha derived inspiration for his ornaments. Among Mucha’s productions of this period are posters for Sarah Bernhardt (for “Gismonde”, The Lady with Camellias”, “The Lovers”, “The Woman of Samaria”, “Lorenzaccio”, “Hamlet” and “Medea”), for art exhibits (Salon des Cent, being the exhibit of one hundred artists where Mucha received one of his first great triumphs) , for business firms (most notable of them are posters) for Job’s cigarettes, for the Champennois lithographic firm, for the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean railroad, etc.—veritable piles of small works, especially invitations to dinners, menus, covers for weeklies and monthlies, business calendars, book covers, great decorative panels and book illustrations. Those of special interest here are his historical illustrations of Seignobos’ “Scenes et Episodes de l’Historie de l’Allemagne”, in which Mucha, after a careful study of historical costumes, etc., created a great many vivid and historically true scenes, among them the martydom of John Hus and the defenestration of the king’s lieutenants from the windows of the castle of Prague.

The whole wealth of the sunny decorative art of Mucha’s is laid open in 132 colored lithographs, illustrating or rather making up the book “Ilsée, princesse de Tripoli”, in which De Flers’ narrations of the love adventures of the mediaeval trouveur Jaufré Rudel is overshadoped by Mucha’s wonderful drawings. The original French edition was issued in 252 copies only and is unobtainable to-day, while Kočí’s Bohemian edition has only black and white illustrations. All the languishing art of Mucha and the dazzling, inexhaustible fantasticism of ornamentation reached their full bloom here.

Less successful is Mucha’s “Pater Noster”, where his art breaks upon the rocks of mysticism. The work upon which Mucha is engaged at present and the art of Kupka, now the head of the Czech colony in France will be taken up next time.