Czech Cubism

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Czech Cubism was avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of the Cubism active mostly in Prague from 1910 to 1914.

Members of this movement realised the epochal significance of Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and attempted to extract its components for their own work in all branches of artistic creativity - sculpture, painting and architecture. The Czech Otto Gutfreund is acknowledged, by the art critic Douglas Cooper (1911-1984), to be the author of the first cubist sculpture Anxiety (Úzkost in Czech), created in 1911 and exhibited in Paris in 1912.

The most notable participants of this movement were the painters Emil Filla, Antonín Procházka, Josef Čapek, the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, the writer Karel Čapek, and the architects Pavel Janák, Josef Gočár, Vlastislav Hofman and Josef Chochol. Many of these artists were members of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts.

After World War I when Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 architectural Czech Cubism gradually developed into Czech Rondocubism which was more decorative as it was influenced by traditional folk ornaments to celebrate the revival of Czech national independence.

[edit] References

• The Czech Cubism Foundation (English)
• What is Czech Cubism? (English)