Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

At the end of the First World War, a new generation of artists began to emerge as a counterpart to the Tvrdošíjní (The Obstinate) group, the most modern art association of the late 1910s and the 1920s. Beginning in 1920, these emerging artists had their base in the Devětsil group. Some of them adopted radical leftist views and strictly opposed artistic academism and its institutions, a position that already classified them among the avant-garde, while distinguishing them from The Obstinate's modernism. The Devětsil poets and painters were united under the agenda of “new proletarian art,” formulated most clearly in Teige's eponymous article published in the spring of 1922 in Revoluční sborník Devětsil (Revolution Journal Devětsil)  [Teige 1922]. It was based on a deterministic hypothesis suggesting that an artist who parted from a bourgeois clientele to join the revolutionary proletariat would reach a higher stage in his work than that achieved by Cubism, Futurism, Civilism or any other -isms of the prewar era. Poets or painters devoted to this agenda would view the world in the same way as workers, choosing themes aligned with the proletariat’s cultural preferences. They would create realistic, commonly understandable works with an undertone of dilettantism, in order to avoid academic virtuosity and to assert the idea when the revolution prevailed, everyone would be able to create art. The idyllic, even childish atmosphere of the scenes these artists depicted envisioned the beauty of the post-revolutionary communist world. The painters' and poets' passionate expressions endowed the simplest everyday things, these “silent companions,” with magic lives of their own.

The Devětsil painters – Alois Wachsman, Adolf Hoffmeister, Ladislav Süss, Karel Vaněk and the architect-painter Josef Havlíček, and the group's intellectual leader, Karel Teige, initially exhibited their works in rented apartments or, on one occasion in 1921, in the window display of the bookstore U zlatého klasu on Spálená Street [Hoffmeister 1962, pp. 57–62; Honzík 1963, pp. 16–17]. In 1922, these artists approached several like-minded students at the Academy of Fine Arts, František Muzika, Bedřich Piskač, and the sculptors Josef Jiříkovský and Bedřich Stefan, and negotiated with Krasoumná jednota (Fine Arts Association) to arrange a more prestigious space for their exhibition in Prague's Rudolfinum. This exhibition also included paintings and drawings by guest participants, the painter Josef Šíma and architect Bedřich Feuerstein, who lived in France at the time. All 127 artworks at the Spring Exhibition, listed in the modest catalogue and reproduced to a great extent in the journals Červen, Veraikon, Orfeus and Kmen between 1921–1922, were installed by Josef Havlíček in a more or less traditional manner, based primarily on how the sculptures and plinths underneath them were arranged in space. The opening had a good turnout with attendees including Zdeněk Nejedlý, a musicologist whose journal Var served as a platform for “new proletarian art;” the poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann, editor of the Červen and Proletkult revues, in which some of the emerging artists published their first works; and the French ambassador and his wife. The exhibition elicited a remarkable response in the large dailies, whose reviewers saw it as the first collective action of the youngest artistic generation. In the leftist newspapers, Rudé právo and Právo lidu, the response was generally positive, while the right-wing Národní listy and Venkov leaned toward a more negative judgment. The reviewers in centrist dailies, Tribuna and Lidové noviny, were members of the Tvrdošíjní group, and their reports of the Spring Exhibition reveal the growing tensions between Tvrdošíjní and Devětsil, particularly evident in the second of the reviews, written by the painter Josef Čapek. On the other hand, the Prager Presse, also a centrist periodical, wrote appreciatively about the show.

All of the reviewers were familiar with the early Devětsil's manifestos and compared the exhibition with them. For this reason, almost all of the critics noticed that the Cubo-Purist style of the guest artists, Feuerstein and Šíma, did not fit with the rest of the show and, with the exception of J. R. Marek, paid little attention to them. Some of the reviewers tried to define the -ism connecting all the artworks on display. Josef Čapek in Lidové noviny referred to the style as “neo-realist primitivism,” while Václav Nebeský in Tribuna coined “poetic naivism,” a term that eventually became more widespread. All of the reviewers, except perhaps the one writing for Rudé právo, noticed that the Spring Exhibition had not brought anything new, as the works represented there followed a number of models such as Henri Rousseau and other French Sunday painters, Jan Zrzavý and other members of Tvrdošíjní, Bohumil Kubišta in his pre-Cubist period, and the postwar Otto Gutfreund, yet without surpassing them in intensity of expression. According to Josef Čapek, Kubišta's work “resounded almost like an organ,” while the artworks at the Spring Exhibition “easily become a children's music box with feeble sound and affected melody.” Nebeský writes that the show remained stuck in “the vicious circle of simple, idyllic and purely intimate emotional agitation and euphoria.” František Žákavec in Národní listy and J. R. Marek in Venkov, too, were bothered by the pretentiousness or artificiality of the artists' efforts to appear amateurish and naive. According to Marek, there was nothing proletarian about it: “The forced naivete, weaving itself into the folk painters' saintly simplicity (...) where naiveness is a genuine expression, a heartfelt crudeness, while here, it is a cold and rigidly executed scheme.”

Other reviewers also noticed the pitfalls of the group's collective program, which allowed only the strongest artistic personalities to stand out slightly. However, there was no consensus among the reviewers about which of the represented artists were the most convincing. Nebeský and Jaromír Pečírka in Prager Presse preferred Adolf Hoffmeister and Bedřich Piskač, while Marek found Hoffmeister's paintings “piddly” and Piskač's “immature, with his artistic individuality still to be refined.” Žákavec highly appreciated František Muzika,“a natural painter” but for Marek, Muzika's figures were “stiff, blunt, and too sentimental and sappy for all their massive volume.” Alois Wachsman, too, received mixed reviews: while the reviewer from Rudé právo praised him (and Muzika), Nebeský evaluated his style as “prematurely confident.” Remarkably, most of the reviews entirely ignored the sculptors Jiříkovský and Stefan, and none mentioned the two works by Karel Teige.

Regarding this central figure of the Czech avant-garde, it appears that it was precisely the preparation of the 1922 Spring Exhibition that led its participants to a conflict with Teige, causing the original Devětsil to disband in the second half of 1922, before they could even start editing the revue Život II. Several facts suggest that there indeed was a clash between the organizers of the Spring Exhibition and Teige. Unlike the next Devětsil exhibition, the Bazaar of Modern Art opened in November 1923, the Spring Exhibition had no programmatic text by Teige, in which he would explain its concept. The brief motto for the exhibition's catalogue was not penned by him – moreover, this brief and simple text originated in contradiction to Teige's ideas, as Adolf Hoffmeister recollected: “The introduction was short, a bit spiteful towards Teige and a bit to his chagrin” [Hoffmeister 1962, p. 63]. It mentioned neither the “new proletarian art” nor Devětsil, so it is not clear whether we can even consider the Spring Exhibition as a Devětsil project. The two “retroactive manifestos” of the exhibition, written by Karel Vaněk and Ladislav Süss and published in the fourth issue of the magazine Kmen, do not shed much light on the issue. While Vaněk paraphrased the content of Teige's earlier texts, Süss refused the “S. U. Devětsil's ideology” and its proclivity to Marxism and Communism because, he claimed, “it said nothing different and unique in painting” [Süss 1922]. By the time Süss wrote this, he had already left Devětsil, along with Vaněk, Wachsman, Hoffmeister and Havlíček, established the Nová skupina (New Group) which brought together the Devětsil dissenters named above and also Muzika, Piskač, Stefan and Jiříkovský. In April and May 1923, Nová skupina organized the Second Spring Exhibition at the Mánes Association of Fine Arts pavilion. However, Teige himself gradually abandoned the idea of “new proletarian art,” beginning, at the latest, after his return from Paris at the end of the summer 1922. The letters he wrote from Paris to the poet Jaroslav Seifert suggest that he was not as angry with the Devětsil dissenters, as they may have been with him [Dačeva 1994]. In any case,  Devětsil's membership base changed and, embracing the “new beauty” of modern world and modern metropolis, the group presented itself to the public in the revue Život II, the first issue of the magazine Disk and the exhibition Bazaar of Modern Art, all published and organized during 1923.

Rostislav Švácha

Works Cited

Teige 1922: Karel Teige, Nové umění proletářské, in: Revoluční sborník Devětsil, Praha 1922, pp. 5–18

Süss 1922: Ladislav Süss, Otázky a snahy mladého výtvarnictví, Kmen V, 1922, pp. 50–60

Vaněk 1922: Karel Vaněk, Utopie realismu, Kmen V, 1922, pp. 60–64

Hoffmeister 1962: Adolf Hoffmeister, Poetický naivismus, in: Hoffmeister, Předobrazy, Praha 1962, pp. 57–80

Honzík 1963: Karel Honzík, Legendární sdružení, in: Honzík, Ze života avantgardy, Praha 1963, pp. 14–22

Dačeva 1994: Rumjana Dačeva, Dopisy Karla Teigeho Jaroslavu Seifertovi, Umění XLII, 1994, pp. 63–73

Further Reading

anonymous author, Otevření výstavy nejmladší skupiny českých výtvarníků, Národní listy LXII, 1922, no. 118, 30. 4., p. 4

Teige, Na II. Jarní výstavě Nové skupiny, Stavba II, 1923–1924, p. 15

anonymous author, Bedřich Piskač. 1898–1929, Český svět XXV, 1929, no. 30, 18. 4., pp. 705–706

František Šmejkal, Jarní výstava 1922, Výtvarná práce X, 1962, no. 8, p. 3 and 4

František Šmejkal – Jan Rous – Rostislav Švácha, Devětsil: Česká výtvarná avantgarda dvacátých let, Praha 1986

František Šmejkal – Rostislav Švácha (edd.), Devětsil: Czech Avant-garde Art, Architecture and Design of the 1920s and 30s, Oxford–London 1990

JŠ [Jana Šmejkalová], Nová skupina, in: Anděla Horová (ed.), Nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění: N–Ž, Prague 1995, p. 570

Rea Michalová, Jarní výstava 1922, in: eadem, Karel Teige: Kapitán avantgardy, Praha 2016, pp. 82–83

Alena Pomajzlová, Proletářské umění a primitivismus, in: eadem (ed.), Devětsil 1921–1930, Praha 2019, pp. 10–15