Pražské baroko 1600–1800 | Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820

Commentary

The exhibition Prague Baroque was a prominent cultural event in the 1930s, surpassing in its scope both the Provincial Anniversary Exhibition (1891) and the Czecho-Slavic Ethnographic Exhibition (1895) [Vydrová–Sedláčková 1938, n.p.]. The Art Club that organized it saw the exhibition's main goal as educating the public. During the opening, Art Club's chairman Václav Rabas pointed out the cultural riches created in the period following the Battle of White Mountain. Due to political events of the 1930s, Václav Vilém Štech generalized this promotion of the Baroque and emphasized the timeless values of art in the period that wants to bring together the present and the past. At the exhibition, the Baroque was presented as a treasure of the Czech nation, a value that spread out across all the art forms. For this reason, the show was accompanied by literary evenings with Shakespeare readings, theatre performances and concerts of classical music in the newly built 1,200-seat amphitheatre. The choice of artworks, criticized by many reviewers, and the theatrical grandeur of the whole project were meant to compensate for the fact that the Baroque had been largely neglected by the existing art-historical research.

The complex approach demanded that the exhibition be divided into two parts – artistic and historical. The first part, based primarily on the artistic effect of the exhibited artifacts, was open to the public in the Waldstein Palace on May 1938. In addition to archival materials (such as, the manuscript of Balbín's Obrana českého jazyka [In Defense of the Czech Language] and Jan Mydlář's bill for the 1621 execution of Czech aristocrats), this part featured mainly sculptures and paintings. Works by Ferdinand Maximilian Brokoff, Matthias Bernard Braun, Franz Preiss, Karl Skreta, Michael Wenzel Halbax, Johann Jacob Hartmann, Johann Georg Heintsch and others represented the stylistic development in the 17^th and 18^th centuries with a clear effort on the organizers' part to capture the specific tone of the Bohemian (national) Baroque. This is why many critics discussed the exhibition's title with its attribute “Prague” which, in their view, did not reflect the Art Club's efforts to evaluate and summarize the importance of the Baroque in the context of Czech history, instead serving to attract foreign tourists and participants of the Sokol congress, a national sports event coinciding with the exhibition. The show's conception, too, was to a degree designed to appeal to tourists, interconnecting the exhibition halls with selected Baroque buildings in the streets of Prague. To make the exhibition visually attractive, the organizers included a number of secondary plaster casts and copies of wall paintings that somewhat overshadowed the originals but helped illustrate the versatility of the Bohemian Baroque legacy.

In the historical part, Václav Vilém Štech and Emanuel Poche exhibited photographs of artworks that were too large or inaccessible to have been presented at the exhibition. This part of the show also featured an historical introduction by Zdeněk Kalista. His interpretation of the peasants' rebellion and life during the Thirty Years' War rekindled the dispute over the meaning of Czech history that had been erupting in waves since the founding of Czechoslovakia. By including the historical background, the organizers hoped to revert the evaluation of the Baroque as a dark period in Czech history. However, their effort to rehabilitate the Baroque by offering a historical perspective was not successful. Despite the exhibition, Jan Slavík wrote that “the Baroque was a product of a waning class in our society and that is why it could not become the foundation of a new cultural life” [Kalista 1938, p. 33].

Because the exhibition was opened in 1938 when Czechoslovakia was celebrating its 20^th anniversary of independence, it was perceived through the national-political lense. This was intensified by mass promotion and numerous reviews in the press criticizing the excessive amount of objects in the exhibition, the effort to appeal to foreigners, and the show's title which, in the critics' view, served primarily to promote the city, making the exhibition a tourist spectacle [Marek 1938, p. 33].

Despite its high visitor rate (187,491 attendees), the exhibition was forced to close due to political events in the fall of 1938. The exhibition committee received an order to immediately clear the Waldstein Palace for the newly established Ministry of Propaganda. The Prague Baroque thus failed to fulfill some of its scholarly goals, such as publishing a monograph and establishing the Museum of Baroque Plaster Casts. However, it spurred new discoveries in the Baroque artistic method, which influenced 1930s art. The lingering Baroque residues resonated in the work of Otto Gutfreund and Jan Štursa and also shaped the interwar generation. The renewed interest in the Baroque opened new possibilities for 20^th-century art.

Martina Bezoušková

Works cited

Kalista 1939: Zdeněk Kalista, O potřebě duchovného zřetele při dějinách selských, Řád, 1939, 4. 2., p. 33

Marek 1938: Josef Richard Marek, Kolem pražského baroku, Národní listy LXXVIII, 1938, no. 194, 17. 7., p. 13

Vydrová – Sedláčková 1938: Pražské baroko. Výstava umění v Čechách XVII.-XVIII. století 1600-1800 (ex. cat.), Valdštejnský palác – palác Zemského zastupitelstva – May-September 1938, Prague 1938

Archival sources

Archive of National Gallery Prague, fonds Moderní galerie (1901-1942), Scrapbooks with clippings concerning exhibitions, artists and activities of MG and other galleries, 1927–1942, acq. no. 939, vol. 13

LA PNP, fonds Josef Träger, Divadlo na výstavě „Pražské baroko“. Article, typescript, 2 ll

LA PNP, fonds Zdeněk Kalista, received correspondence

Poster