Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

The exhibition at the Rubeš Gallery (Ferdinandova Street 28) in 1917 was the first to offer a comprehensive perspective on the work of Augustin Piepenhagen. It featured 195 paintings by Piepenhagen, 41 works by his daughter Charlotte, and 6 paintings by his other daughter, Louisa. It also included portraits of Augustin Piepenhagen and his daughters by Louisa Berková and a portrait of the artist's wife by Josef Koruna. The accompanying catalogue, authored by Rudolf Kuchynka, was the first publication to provide in-depth interpretations of some of the works, to place undated works in the context of the artist’s oeuvre, and to point out connections with other artists. Piepenhagen was presented as an important figure of Czech 19th-century art, whose poetic style was close to that of Josef Navrátil and who enriched Czech landscape painting with “poeticism” and a romantic mood, albeit exemplified by artificially composed natural sceneries that were only “inspired” by reality. Kuchynka appreciated Piepenhagen’s sense of colour, which is the true essence of painting, and his depiction of sentiment and melancholy. As in 19th-century critiques, Piepenhagen's moonlit landscapes received great acclaim at the exhibition: Kuchynka compared them to the work of Dutch painter Aert van der Neer (1603-1677). The conclusion of the catalogue lists the names of Piepenhagen's students, who besides his daughters included Jan Rissbitter, Karel Krumpiegel, Agathon Klemt, Bertha von Grab, and Julius Gruss, and whose works were in the collection of industrialist Otto Kretschmer. Although the catalogue does not list the exhibited works, it represents an interesting document about collectors and owners of Piepenhagen's work at the beginning of the 20th century. The text concludes with a list of the existing literature on Piepenhagen and can thus be considered the first systematic attempt at a monograph (the portrait of the artist on the endpaper of the book was taken from Frankl's Sonntagsblätter in Vienna; the catalog features six reproductions of Piepenhagen's work).

The show was covered by the exhibition section of Časopis společnosti přátel starožitností (Journal of the Society of Friends of Antiquities). As in the exhibition catalogue, Piepenhagen was primarily appreciated as a dilettante and autodidact, a painter by nature who did not allow himself to be carried away by the official stream of academicism as represented by Josef Bergler. The magazine Beseda lidu also published a brief report, accompanied by a black and white reproduction of Navrátil's landscape painting Sunset. Another review appeared in Volné směry. Its author, Vilém Dvořák, appreciated that the material was well organized by Rudolf Kuchynka and that the exhibition allowed for a better understanding of Piepenhagen's role in Bohemian romantic landscape painting of the 19th century. The art historian Václav Vilém Štech wrote an extensive text, published in installments in the magazine Venkov, in which he offers a comprehensive evaluation of the exhibition and its contribution to Czech art history. Štech sees Piepenhagen in the context of modern art and concludes that the modern era will not surpass or negate the earlier periods. Piepenhagen and Navrátil represent a romantic outlier, a private painterly detour in Bohemia. [Štech, 1917]. The exhibition, consisting primarily of works from the Otto Kretschmer collection, provided Štech with a starting point for contemplating the emergence of the Second Rococo in the 1840s and the conscious citations of the first, 18th-century Rococo. Štech is thus one of the first historians to notice the organic survival of older artistic tradition in Czech art, an observation that stemmed directly from several works in the Piepenhagen exhibition. He made further comments on the exhibition and its catalogue, which were later elaborated on by Anna Masaryková.

Marie Fiřtová

Works Cited

Václav Vilém Štech, Augustin Piepenhagen I–II, Venkov XII, 1917, no. 173, 22. 7., p. 3; no. 197, 19. 8., p. 3

Further Reading

Šárka Leubnerová, August Piepenhagen 1791–1868, Litoměřice 2018

Naděžda Blažíčková-Horová (ed.), August, Bedřich, Charlotta a Louisa Piepenhagenovi, Praha 2009

Prokop Toman, Studie a vzpomínky českého sběratele, Praha 1920 (a study for the magazinee Venkov from March 23 and September 23, 1917)

Anonymous author, (report), Besedy lidu XXV, 1917, no. 21, p. 255

V. H., (report), Týn. Sborník literární a umělecký I, 1917, p. 383

František Xaver Šalda, (report) Kmen I, 1918, p. 9

Anonymous author, (report), Památky archeologické a místopisné XXIX, 1917, p. 232