The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context

Isabel Wünsche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351777995
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production.

Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.

PART I

Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States

1

PRAGUE—BRNO

Expressionism in Context

Marie Rakušanová

What Is Expressionism—in Bohemia?

“An expressionist wants, above all, to express himself . . . The will of the new formulation necessitated synthesis rather than analysis, subjective transcript rather than objective description,”¹ wrote the Czech art theoretician Antonín Matějček (1889–1950) in 1910 in his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Les Indépendants organized by the Mánes Association of Fine Artists. He thus became one of the first European critics to introduce the term “expressionism” into the terminology of art history. However, he was not applying it to some German artist, but rather to describe the works of the French postimpressionists featured in the exhibition. Around this time, apart from Matějček, only a few European critics were using the term expressionism in connection with the work of French artists, including the English critic Alan Clutton Brock and the Swedish theoretician Carl David Moselius.² For these critics, “expressionist” seemed the most appropriate way of describing the anti-naturalistic approach of the French postimpressionists and fauvists.³

The term achieved a wider currency among Czech theoreticians and artists after 1912, with the publication of the German critic Paul Ferdinand Schmidt’s article “Die Expressionisten” (The Expressionists) in the German art magazine Der Sturm.⁴ Schmidt’s article, which examined the work of the French postimpressionists, the fauvists and several young German artists, centered on exhibitions held in the Berlin gallery of Herwarth Walden. Since Czech artists had participated in these exhibitions, they thus had the opportunity to see up close the crystallization of this new term.

During and after the First World War, Czech art criticism associated expressionism exclusively with contemporary German art, from which some members of the Czech art community, especially those associated with the Brno-based Literární skupina (Literary Group), sought inspiration, particularly due to its emphasis on expressive quality, engagement, and metaphysical significance. By contrast, other representatives of the interwar avant-garde, for example Karel Teige (1900–1951), made German expressionism the target of harsh criticism. In doing so, these writers were reflecting another semantic shift that took place in Germany between 1914 and 1916 with the publication of books by Paul Fechter and Hermann Bahr.⁵ In these publications, expressionism was placed in contradistinction to impressionism and identified not with any French style but with art of a purely Germanic, “anti-Romanic” character. The fierce polemics between Czech champions and opponents of expressionism, which will be examined in more detail below, were undoubtedly marked by this ethnic conception of German expressionist theory.⁶

The term “expressionism” was first applied specifically to Czech art retrospectively, and remains problematic within the context of Czech art history. Not until the 1950s did theoreticians begin to associate the term more consistently with the work of the group Osma (The Prague Eight, 1907–1909), i.e., with the early work of Emil Filla (1882–1953), Antonín Procházka (1882–1945), Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918), and others.⁷ The so-called “expressionist period” was regarded as a milestone on the path to cubism, and this interpretation became embedded in the Czech historiography. Unlikely as it seems, the term “Czech expressionism” manifests even less cohesion than does its German counterpart: either it is regarded as a transitional phase in the work of individual artists prior to or after cubism, or it is linked with solitary figures such as Jan Zrzavý (1890–1977) and Josef Váchal (1884–1969). Furthermore, Czech art historians always emphasize the particular genealogy of the Czech expressionism of the Osma group, which differed fundamentally from the genesis of German expressionism.⁸ According to this reading, Czech expressionism is closely bound to the French realist tradition of Honoré Daumier and the postimpressionism of Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, as well as to the idiosyncratic Nordic psychologism of Edvard Munch.⁹ The traditional emphasis on France in the orientation of Czech modernist and avant-garde art, bolstered by the statements of contemporaneous artists and theoreticians, prompted Donald E. Gordon, for example, to describe Czech expressionism as an intermediary in the alignment of the values of modernist art from France to Germany along a Paris-Prague-Berlin axis.¹⁰ A reappraisal of these entrenched ideas will also form the subject of this chapter. Although the artistic community in Bohemia at that time would never have conceded the possibility of creative initiatives flowing from the direction of Germany, in reality the proximity of German culture exerted a considerable and positive impact on Czech artists and theoreticians.

Another distinctive feature of the Czech variety of expressionism is the phenomenon known as cubo-expressionism,¹¹ introduced into Czech art history by Miroslav Lamač (1928–1992) and confirming the tendency of Czech historiography to regard expressionism as a transitional phase with respect to the more dominant cubism.¹² It is not only in Czech art history, however, that Lamač’s concept of cubo-expressionism has found use.¹³ The term was also appropriated by Donald E. Gordon,¹⁴ and Steven A. Mansbach even writes of “uniquely creative forms of cubo-expressionism” in Habsburg Bohemia.¹⁵ It took James Elkins to draw attention to the confusion arising from use of the term cubo-expressionism to delineate the originality and progressivity of Czech modernism, when, in a review of Mansbach’s book, he wrote: “it seems apparent that an innovation (cubo-expressionism) which needs to be described in terms of two prior innovations (cubism and expressionism) may be hard to present as an avant-garde.”¹⁶

This excursion into terminology is essential if we are to examine the problematic nature of expressionism in Bohemia. It allows us to identify many entrenched ideas and difficult aspects associated with expressionism in Czech art history. The following discussion will attempt to track the artistic tendencies traditionally linked with the term expressionism in Bohemia in both their period and subsequent contexts. I will focus on artistic, cultural, and social events in two centers, Prague and Brno. Emphasis will be placed on exhibition policy, art magazines, and the establishment of contacts both within the country and abroad within the framework of groups of artists and individuals. The traditional deployment of the terms expressionism and cubo-expressionism, inextricably bound up with a stylistic base that is difficult to define, and the formal manifestations of such artworks will be subjected to more detailed investigation and criticism.

Prague, Expressionism, and the Osma Group

“Prague doesn’t let go. Of either of us. This dear old mother has claws. You have to submit or—. We would have to set fire to it on two sides, at Vyšehrad and at Hradschin, and then we might get away.”¹⁷ With these few words, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) fully encompasses the complex emotional state of life as an intellectual in Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century: a feeling of despair engendered by the provincial environment, yet at the same time a city he endearingly refers to in the diminutive as “this dear old mother” (dieses Mütterchen). Although a member of the Jewish, German-speaking minority,¹⁸ Kafka had struck up a kind of fateful, close relationship with the Czech city. Its illustrious past and its ethnic, linguistic, intellectual, religious, and artistic diversity ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Notes to the Reader
• Expressionist Networks, Cultural Debates, and Artistic Practices: A Conceptual Introduction
• Part I Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States
• Part II Scandinavia
• Part III Western Europe
• Part IV Southeastern Europe
• Part V Beyond Europe
• Selected Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Geographical Index