Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

In the 1860s, Czech architects founded the Association of Architects and Engineers in the Kingdom of Bohemia (Spolek architektů a inženýrů v Království českém, SIA) to promote and advocate for their common interests. In 1865, it began publishing the magazine Zprávy (Reports) [Vybíral 2003]. The association brought together graduates from Prague's technical university and by the beginning of the 20^th century, it had gained the reputation of being a strongly conservative group hostile toward modern architectural trends. Architects who studied at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts with Otto Wagner, the pioneer of Central-European modernism, and at Prague's School of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts with Jan Kotěra and Josef Plečnik felt the need to establish a new association with a more modern agenda. In 1908, the circle around Jan Kotěra, Bohumil Hypšman [Hübschmann], Pavel Janák, Josef Gočár and Otakar Novotný began publishing the magazine Styl (Style) and in 1919, the same architects founded the Society of Architects, the first Czech professional architectural association with a modernist agenda. Along with graduates from the Academy and the School of Applied Arts, it included younger graduates from the technical university who disagreed with SIA's conservatism, such as Oldřich Tyl, Jiří Kroha and Bedřich Feuerstein. These architects, however, soon joined the Architects' Club and founded the journal Stavba (Construction) in 1921.

On January 31, 1921, the Society of Architects decided to organize a members' exhibition which opened in Prague's Museum of Applied Arts in mid-April. The organizers, with Zdeněk Wirth, the respected art historian and editor of the prewar Styl among them, planned the show as a panorama of contemporary Czech architecture and the largest exhibition of contemporary architecture to date. It aimed to showcase primarily designs and photographs. The organizers placed emphasis on the “retrospective” aspect, presenting the roots of modern architecture in the first two decades of the 20^th century. The section dedicated to the founder of Czech modern architecture, Jan Kotěra, gave the exhibition a historical dimension, further enhanced by Wirth's opening speech reprinted in Styl. Wirth and Styl's editor-in-chief Vilém Dvořák also published an information booklet for the exhibition, now missing.   

Installed in the three halls on the ground floor of the Museum of Applied Arts, the show contained an undeniably valuable and interesting collection. The Society's members later wanted to preserve it for the future but this never materialized. The Czech public showed great interest in the exhibition which was repeated in museums of applied arts in Hradec Králové, Chrudim and České Budějovice. However, detailed reviews in the daily press and specialized periodicals were rather scarce. In his review for Tribuna, Václav Nebeský elaborated on his favourite theme – the ethical foundation of modern artistic work – which, in his view, is embodied in the purity and clarity of architectural expression freed from unnecessary pathos: a good architect designs a house as a house and not a palace, a villa as a villa and not a castle, a theatre as a theatre, and a museum as a museum. This is perhaps the first time that the word purism is mentioned, albeit in passing, by a Czech art critic in connection with Kotěra. However, says Nebeský in Tribuna, our present appears to be marked by the desire for a less austere architecture: “Where the earlier, Cubist structures captivated people's attention, we now see the need for new, striking decoration. Where earlier on, architecture was pure architecture, there is now the so-called colourful architecture.” Here, Nebeský alludes to Janák's and Gočár's concept of the “national style,” that is, rondocubism, sharply criticized by Josef Chochol in the third exhibition of the Tvrdošíjní (The Obstinate) and in the revue Musaion in 1921.

Rostislav Švácha

Works Cited

Vybíral 2003: Jindřich Vybíral, Německá architektura v Praze v letech 1900–1918: Tvůrci a záměry, Umění LI, 2003, pp. 306–324

Further reading

Josef Pechar – Petr Urlich, Programy české architektury, Praha 1981, p. 289 and 296

anonymous author, Členská výstava Společnosti architektů, Umění I, 1919–1921, p. 464

anonymous author, Společnost architektů, Styl I (VI), 1920–1921, pp. 16–17

anonymous author, Společnost architektů v Praze, Styl I (VI), 1920–1921, p. 110

anonymous author, Ze Společnosti architektů, Styl II (VII), 1921–1922, p. 83

 K [Alois Kubiček], Výroční valná hromada Společnosti architektů v Praze, Styl II (VII), 1921–1922, pp. 115–116