Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

In addition to presentations in the magazines Musaion and Červen, art exhibitions became the main medium for Tvrdošíjní (The Obstinate) to showcase their works both locally and internationally. Their third exhibition in Prague at the beginning of 1921 was special because, in addition to the group's five members – Čapek, Hofman, Kremlička, Špála and Zrzavý – numerous guest artists were represented there. These included four Czech-German painters –  Justitz, Kars, Feigl and Adler – and a number of German Expressionists from the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe, including the famous Swiss artist Paul Klee. Tvrdošíjní hosted the German artists in return for their earlier invitation to Germany. The third Tvrdošíjní show also presented Emil Filla, who had recently returned from his Dutch exile and who, in 1912, had parted with Čapek, Hofman and Špála on bad terms [Lamač 1988, pp. 339–345; Švácha 2000, pp. 36–37]. Other new artists at the exhibition included the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, for whom this was the first opportunity to present his work in Prague after an extensive stay in France, and three architects: Kroha, Chochol and Feuerstein.

The set of artworks at the exhibition, a small number of which were presented in the second volume of Musaion (1921), can be reconstructed from the catalogue, which contained an introduction by Václav Nebeský, a historian and modern art critic. In his text, Nebeský points to the fact that Tvrdošíjní were still the most modern group in Prague at this time – the Devětsil generation had yet to appear in public. Aside from characterizing the personal styles of each of the group's five members, he emphasized the artists' common feature: a sense of order and an ethical dimension. In his more extensive, two-part review for the daily Tribuna, Nebeský tries to distinguish the German guests' Expressionism, their “naked expression” with traces of hysteria and grotesqueness, from the Czechs' purer, more restrained and deeper artistic expression informed by modern French culture [N 1921].

This polarity, still used even today for defining the differences between Expressionism and Czech Cubist and post-Cubist art, appears in reviews by the author J. P. writing for Lidové noviny, the critic C. in Rudé právo and J. R. Marek in the daily Venkov. All of the reviewers highly appreciated the works by Rudolf Kremlička. Only “C” (probably the Devětsil member Artuš Černík) valued Jan Zrzavý's collection even higher than Kremlička’s. Later on, Devětsil's intellectual leader Karel Teige followed the same line in his own evaluation of works by Tvrdošíjní  [Teige 1923–1924]. Further on in his review, “C” criticizes Emil Filla for “barren mechanism of pictorial fragmentation” and Gutfreund for expressionless poverty without noticing Gutfreund's turn away from Cubism to civilist figural sculpture at the beginning of the 1920s. The contrast between Gutfreund's prewar and postwar works also escaped J. R. Marek who, nevertheless, appreciated Gutfreund's “heavy volumes reminiscent of works by folk primitives.” The growing tension between Devětsil members and Josef Čapek, whose interests were in fact often identical, was likely stoked by “C” claiming that Čapek was unable to “convey the suffering of the lower-class people depicted in his paintings” and that his works were characterized by “toyshop playfulness and civilized curiosity.” Among the German guests, Paul Klee and his “simple, child-like drawings” (“C” in Rudé právo) drew the most attention; the conservative critic J. R. Marek regarded them as an expression of “childish, rather than child-like, naive innocence” while Nebeský in Tribuna admitted that “it is unlikely they would find followers among adults in Czechoslovakia” [C 1921, pp. 7–8; Marek 1921, p. 4].

All the critics except for Nebeský commented on the exhibition's architectural section. Architecture students Jan E. Koula and Josef Karel Říha even wrote separate reviews of it for Drobné umění and Lidové noviny. In addition to Cubist projects by Vlastislav Hofman and Jiří Kroha, the exhibition featured Purist-oriented projects by Bedřich Feuerstein as well as Josef Chochol's entirely Purist projects, the first of their kind in Czech architecture. Chochol then published some of these projects in the second volume of Musaion, along with the manifesto entitled What I Strive for, aimed against Janák's and Gočár's Rondocubism. Some of the reviewers were at a loss when faced with Chochol's radical designs; it was difficult for them to even find a descriptive word for the style. Koula wrote about their “dry, stepped, cubic volumes” and Říha describes them as “dry and without content.” The critic “C,” on the other hand, referred to them as “architecturally pure” and expressed his regret that Chochol only exhibited the facades. Quite surprisingly, J. R. Marek was the most appreciative of Chochol's collection. In his view, the designs were marked by “lively irregularity in the rectilinear, strongly relief-like shape of the overall mass” [C 1921, pp. 7–8; K 1921, p. 63; Říha 1921, p. 9; Marek 1921, p. 4]. In his memoirs Ze života avantgardy (From the Life of the Avant-Garde), Karel Honzík writes about the shock Chochol's Purist drawings delivered to the youngest architects and the impact these works had on their own designs, first showcased at the exhibition of the Prague School of Architecture Student Association on Jeruzalémská Street [Honzík 1963, p. 28]: “Bare. And yet, it was architecture.”

Rostislav Švácha

Works Cited

C 1921: C [Artuš Černík?], Tvrdošíjní a hosté: Výstava III, Rudé právo II, no. 35, 11. 2., pp. 7–8

Honzík 1963: Karel Honzík, Ze života avantgardy, Praha 1963

K 1921: K. [Jan E. Koula], Architekti na výstavě „Tvrdošíjných“, Drobné umění II, 1921, p. 63

Lamač 1988: Miroslav Lamač, Osma a Skupina výtvarných umělců, 1907–1917, Praha 1988

Marek 1921: J. R. Marek, III. výstava „Tvrdošíjných“ a jejich hostí, Venkov XVI, no. 31, 6. 2., p. 4

N 1921: V. N. [Václav Nebeský], Třetí výstava Tvrdošíjných: Češi a Němci, Tribuna III, 1921, no. 25, 30. 1., Sunday supplement, p. 7 – V. N. [Václav Nebeský], Třetí výstava Tvrdošíjných II, Tribuna III, 1921, no. 31, 6. 2., Sunday supplement, p. 1

Říha 1921: J. Říha, Architektura na posledních výstavách výtvarných spolků, Lidové noviny XXIX, 1921, no. 55, 1. 2., p. 9

Švácha 2000: Rostislav Švácha, The Pyramid, the Prism and the Arc: Czech Cubist Architecture 1911–1924, Praha 2000

Teige 1923–1924: Karel Teige, Rudolf Kremlička: Kresby, Stavba II, 1923–1924, p. 20. – Karel Teige, Na V. výstavě „Tvrdošíjných“, Stavba II, 1923–1924, p. 14

Further reading

Jaroslav Slavík, Skupina Tvrdošíjní (Ke kronice její aktivity), Umění XXX, 1982, pp. 193–213

Karel Srp, Tvrdošíjní (exh. cat., Galerie hlavního města Prahy), Praha 1986

Karel Srp (ed.), Tvrdošíjní a hosté: 2. část (exh. cat., Galerie hlavního města Prahy), Praha 1987

Karel Srp, Tvrdošíjní a Devětsil, Umění XXXV, 1987, pp. 54–68

Jaroslav Slavík, Tvrdošíjní, in: Vojtěch Lahoda – Mahulena Nešlehová – Marie Platovská – Rostislav Švácha – Lenka Bydžovská (edd.), Dějiny českého výtvarného umění (IV/1), 1890–1938, Praha 1998, pp. 295–311

anonymous author, Krasoumná jednota, Lidové noviny XXIX, 1921, no. 33, 20. 1., p. 9

anonymous author, Výstava Tvrdošíjných pořádaná Krasoumnou jednotou, Tribuna III, 1921, no. 17, 21. 1., p. 5

Václav Nebeský, Výtvarné umění ve starém roce, Tribuna III, 1921, no. 1, 1. 1., p. 15

Václav Nebeský, Umění po impresionismu, Prague 1923