Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

Following his return home from a successful stay in the United States in 1905-1910, the painter Alphonse Mucha decided that from now on, he would work selflessly for the Czech nation and the Slavic world. The most important part of this idealist plan – a series entitled The Slav Epic – materialized between 1909 and 1928. It consisted of twenty huge canvases that depicted the crucial moments in the history of all Slavic nations, focusing on spiritual rather than war events [Bydžovská – Srp 2011, pp. 31–66]. In 1909, Mucha and his American sponsor Charles Richard Crane obtained a promise from the Prague municipality that after they donated the finished Slav Epic to Prague, the city would build a new pavilion for its permanent exhibition. However, this agreement between the painter and the city of Prague met with criticism from Czech modernist painters. The dispute intensified when Mucha first showcased the complete Slav Epic in the Trade Fair Palace in 1928, and even now, it still influences the work’s fate. Artists and critics from the modernist camp were bothered by Mucha’s style, which many saw as outdated and pandering to popular taste. In addition, as early as around 1909, some accused the painter of unfair competition. These critics disapproved of the fact that while there were no permanent exhibitions dedicated to actual masters of Czech modern painting, such as Josef Mánes and Mikoláš Aleš, Mucha would get one in the pavilion for the Slav Epic. In 1919, Antonín Balšánek’s design for the pavilion on the Petřín Hill sparked a wave of criticism, and even though that same year, Mucha exhibited part of the Epic in the Baroque building of the Prague Klementinum, the outrage did not subside [Bydžovská – Srp 2011, pp. 238–240]. 

In September 1928, the massive new building for the Prague Sample Trade Fairs, designed by Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs, was nearing completion. The architects had won the limited competition in 1924 with the project employing the latest architectural trend – the Functionalist style. The idea to open the new building with the exhibition of the Slav Epic came from the director of the Prague Trade Fairs, Václav Boháč and the Prague Mayor, Karel Baxa. Boháč, a member of the Prague City Council for the National Socialist Party, was a pragmatic Panslavist. Even before the First World War, he promoted his idea of Prague as the “Mecca” of all Slavs. However, he believed that the cooperation between Slavic nations and states should not remain limited to cultural exchange. More important to him was mutual trade. After the founding of Czechoslovakia, when he successfully established the Prague Sample Trade Fairs, his efforts concentrated on endorsing exhibitions of Slavic nations, including Soviet Russia, whose state pavilion was first featured in Prague at the same time as Mucha’s Slav Epic, in the autumn of 1928 [Masák – Švácha – Vybíral 1995]. Despite his pragmatic take on Panslavism, Boháč was not against bolstering his program with a symbolic gesture, and the exhibition of the Slav Epic at the Trade Fair Palace was to play just such a role. The opening took place on September 21, 1928, and, in addition to Baxa, Boháč, and Mucha, the speakers included the ambassadors of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, all of them paraphrasing Boháč’s idea about Prague as a pilgrimage site of Slavs. Shortly before the opening, Vlastimil Louda, the secretary of the Prague Fairs, wrote that when the Great Courtyard in the Trade Fair Palace gets filled with Mucha's works, “it will turn into a great temple of Slavic spirit, love and enthusiasm, in which the individual paintings will be symbolic stops of sorts on the historical pilgrimage of Slavs towards the final victory of the Slavic race” [Louda 1928].

The architects Tyl and Fuchs designed the Great Courtyard for exhibiting large machines. They conceived it as a factory hall with glass walls and a glass ceiling. Mucha likely felt a discrepancy between the industrial character of the courtyard and the conception of his Epic and, with the financial support of the city of Prague, tried to adjust the space so it would provide a better environment for his work. He envisioned an evocation of an autumn orchard [Bydžovská – Srp 2011, p. 63], in line with the concept of prominent art exhibitions at the beginning of the 20th century when exhibition designers combined artworks with vegetation. Mucha’s idea resembled, for example, the 1902 Prague exhibition of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, designed by Jan Kotěra. Mucha had the courtyard floor covered with sand and then placed pots with pine trees and flowers on top. He also covered the glass walls with dark fabric, adorning the edges of the space with giant sculptures Czech Song, Nikolskaya, and Venus by the sculptor Emanuel Kodet [Anonymous author 1928a]. However, according to some reviewers, he still failed to hide the contradiction between the historicism of the Epic and the industrial functionalism of Tyl’s and Fuchs’s space. Critics sympathetic to Mucha advised visitors to ignore the architecture [Harlas 1928] or recommended that Mucha’s work be presented to the public in a more dignified and representative setting [Seyfert 1928]. The modernist painter Zdenek Rykr took the opposite view – to him, the presence of the anachronistic Slav Epic in a modern Functionalist building was something incomprehensible: “The architect Tyl certainly did not expect this and will be no less perplexed than most of us when facing the questions: how does this epic, and the trade fairs, and Mucha’s Art Nouveau, and the constructivist building, how does it all fit together?” [Rykr 1928]. However, most reports on the opening of the Trade Fair Palace in the daily press followed the same pattern: modernist-oriented authors focused on the architecture and ignored the Slav Epic. As the journalist Jiří Hejda summed it up, “...far more interesting than all those exhibitions is the building itself.” [Hejda 1928]

For critics from the modernist camp, such as Viktor Nikodem, Mucha’s style or form of his history painting were unacceptably anachronistic [Nikodem 1928]. Mucha's distinctive symbolist innovations in this traditional genre of 19th-century academic painting did not convince them. On the contrary, they blamed the Slav Epic for deviating from the rules of history painting [Pečírka 1928]. Left-leaning critics saw even the Panslavic content of Mucha’s cycle as politically reactionary. Some – for example, the painter František Muzika – associated it with the neo-Slavic political visions of Karel Kramář, the leader of the Czech right [Muzika 1928a]. The clearest representation of this perceived connection between Kramář and the Slav Epic appeared in a cartoon (perhaps again by Zdenek Rykr) in the magazine Trn, depicting Kramář and his wife as they sit in armchairs in their living room with a child on a potty in the foreground, the whole scene bearing the title “The Slav Epic” [Anonymous author 1928c]. The review of the art historian František Žákavec, who was open to Panslavism, voiced a specific concern, namely that the Slav Epic remained dependent on the turn-of-the-century Parisian Art Nouveau and was therefore not Slavic and Czech enough [Žákavec 1929]. But the rejection of Mucha's work by the modernist-minded Czech public had another reason, associated with the 1909 promise that the City of Prague would build a new pavilion for the Slav Epic. In 1928, the Parliament of the Czechoslovak Republic decided to use the Picture Gallery of the Society of Patriotic Friends of Fine Arts in Rudolfinum as a restaurant for its members. The idea that the most valuable domestic collection of old masters would lose its space to the comfort of the MPs while the Slav Epic would get a pavilion of its own seemed “outrageous” to many authors, such as František Muzika [Muzika 1928b]. 

As early as before the First World War, the painter Josef Čapek called the Slav Epic a “liability” and in his essay from November 1928, he claimed that the public’s response to it was “mixed and not particularly enthusiastic” [Čapek 1928]. Čapek words perhaps characterized the reception of the Epic in the daily press and specialized magazines. Indeed, there were relatively few longer texts, with positive reviews penned by anti-modernist authors such as the art historian F. X. Harlas [Harlas 1928]. But some newspaper reports suggest that not only the likes of Harlas, Seyfert, Rejs, and other conservatives but also the ordinary visitors of the Trade Fair Palace enjoyed Mucha’s work. The right-wing daily Národní politika published the following testimony: “Thousands of visitors parade daily past the huge canvases of Slavic history with emotion and in silent contemplation, and many of them come again and again to get a grasp of this unique work.” [Anonymous author 1928b] The writer Jaroslav Humberger described the work’s success with broad masses in similar words: “And here, pilgrim, you will gasp at the sight of the gloomy and obscured beauty of Mucha’s originals. And so we walk filled with pious feeling towards the great work from one painting to the next, carried away by the crowd and our emotion.” [Humberger 1928] The 1928 exhibition of the Slav Epic at the Trade Fair Palace thus once again revealed the contradiction between popular taste on the one hand and the preferences of the more sophisticated followers of modernism on the other. This contradiction was present in the reception of Mucha’s work more than in the case of any other modern Czech artist, and it persisted well into the following decades.

Rostislav Švácha – Lenka Bydžovská

Works Cited

Bydžovská – Srp 2011: Lenka Bydžovská – Karel Srp (eds), Alfons Mucha Slovanská epopej, Praha 2011

Čapek 1928: Josef Čapek, Kam s ní?, Lidové noviny XXXVI, no. 580, 15. 11. 1928, p. 7

Harlas 1928: Dr. F. X. Harlas, Slovanská epopej Alfonse Muchy, Národní politika XLVI, Supplement of „Národní politika“ no. 272. from September 30, 1828, p. 1

Hejda 1928: Jiří Hejda, První veletržní palác, Lidové noviny XXXVI, no. 487, 25. 9. 1928, supplement PVV: Veletržní příloha Lidových novin, pp. 1–2

Humberger 1928: Jaroslav Humberger, Procházka po Veletržním paláci, Lidové noviny XXXVI, no. 494, 28. 9. 1928, p. 1

Louda 1928: V[lastimil] Louda, Slavný podzim 1928, Nová Praha IX, no. 36, 6. 9. 1928, p. 2

Masák – Švácha – Vybíral 1995: Miroslav Masák – Rostislav Švácha – Jindřich Vybíral, Veletržní palác v Praze, Praha 1995

Muzika 1928a: F. M. [František Muzika], Výstavy, Musaion no. 1, November 1928, p. 24

Muzika 1928b: František Muzika, Slovanská epopej, Musaion no. 2, December 1928, p. 48

Anonym 1928a: Slavnostní otevření výstavy Slovanské epopeje, Národní politika XLVI, no. 264, 22. 9. 1928, p. 4

Anonym 1928b: Pražské vzorkové veletrhy: Druhý den, Národní politika XLVI, no. 269, 27. 9. 1928, p. 4

Nikodem 1928: N [=Viktor Nikodem], Muchova Slovanská epopej, Národní osvobození V, no. 292, 21. 10. 1928, p. 5

Pečírka 1928: Jaromír Pečírka, Die Slawische Epopöe, Prager Presse VIII, no. 278, 6. 10. 1928, p. 8

Rykr 1928: Z[denek] Rykr, Palác P.V.V., Národní osvobození V, no. 243, 2. 9. 1928, p. 4

Seyfert 1928: Inž. L[adislav] Seyfert, Po posledním pražském veletrhu, Lidové noviny XXXVI, no. 502, 3. 10. 1928, p. 2

Anonym 1928c: Slovanská epopej, Trn IV, 1928, no. 19, p. 12

Žákavec 1929: K ukončení Muchovy „Slovanské epopeje“, Umění II, 1929, pp. 142–244 

Anonym, Pražský veletrh, Rudé právo IX, no. 230, 27. 9. 1928, p. 7

D. K., Sedmnáctý veletrh, Lidové noviny XXXVI, no. 487, 25. 9. 1928, příloha PVV: Veletržní příloha Lidových novin, pp. 1–2

Štěpán Ješ, Vnucený dar, Cesta I, 1918–1919, sheet 42, pp. 1165–1166  

J. Kolářík, O otci pražských veletrhů, Lidové noviny XXXVI, no. 487, 25. 9. 1928, příloha PVV: Veletržní příloha Lidových novin, pp. 1–2

Karel Kříž, Rusko vystavuje na P.V.V., Právo lidu XXXVII, no. 231, 29. 9. 1928, p. 1

Václav Nebeský, Kol Muchovy Slovanské epopeje, Tribuna I, no. 95, 23. 5. 1919, p. 12

N [Viktor Nikodem], Výstava Muchovy Slovanské epopeje, Národní osvobození V, no. 263, 22. 9. 1928, p. 4

Vlastimil Rada, Písničky, jež pějí o osudech panorám a epopejí, Rozpravy Aventina IV, 1928–1929, no. 27–28, p. 268 

-zs-, Nový palác PVV, Venkov XXIII, no. 228, 25. 9. 1928, p. 4