Art:
Gneuhs, Geoffrey
ART OPENING FROM THE HEART THE GUGGENHEIM GOES CZECH The Moldau has come to Manhattan. Now through September 18, sixty works from the Narodni Galerie in Prague will be on view at the Guggenheim...
...But such experimentation was no longer necessarily isolated...
...The Czech artists represented in the third section of the exhibition were all very much part of the international milieu permeating from Paris...
...Frantisek Kupka, a major figure in modern Czech art, is represented in the exhibition by six works...
...The European grouping includes works from Norway, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Russia...
...These works are fiercely and impressionistically painted, although the colors-with an emphasis on blue-afe muted and scattered, a foreshadowing of the turmoil that was to be the fate of the young Czechoslovak republic only a few years later...
...There are works by Munch (whose paintings were seen in Prague as early as 1905), Shiele, Constant Permeke, and two Soviet artists, R. Robert Falk and Aristarch Lentulov...
...On the lower left of the panel is an automobile tire with a leak, a fissure-an odd sense of "synthesis...
...Works by the latter show the influence of Cezanne and the Cubist movement that followed him...
...Their works, however, stand on their own...
...Photography was beginning to have a major impact...
...The publics of both countries will see paintings never before exhibited in their respective lands...
...Likewise, design and form became configurations of disjointed geometrical shapes...
...Then there is Jan Zrzavy's Sermon on the Mount...
...The colors are greyish and ashen...
...Now through September 18, sixty works from the Narodni Galerie in Prague will be on view at the Guggenheim Museum...
...Europe...
...Of the selections, his Creation is the most appealing...
...Entitled "Modern Treasures from the National Gallery in Prague," the exhibit includes paintings by such major figures of pioneering modernism as Cezanne, Gauguin, Klimt, Matisse, Munch, Braque, Picasso, and Toulouse-Lautrec...
...Vincenc Benes's Susanna at Her Bath, on the other hand, is quite lovely, using cerulean blues and raw sienna...
...Experimentation became the norm...
...The age demanded an escape from the ordinary and mundane, as well as from the terrible affairs of the world at hand...
...Josef Sima's surrealist Untitled is an oddly attractive painting of a nude woman, emerging like a goddess from the side of a palisade...
...Such artistic exchanges are fundamental to any under standing of a people and are the basis for respect between East and West...
...This exhibition is an opening from the heart of...
...Though a "whole," their parts clash, almost violently, and both works lack a pleasing order...
...The Guggenheim Foundation will sponsor a reciprocal ex hibition in Prague in November...
...GEOFFREY GNEUHS...
...It could be Picasso as a child and resembles in tone and mood Picasso's famous Self-Portrait of 1907, which is also in the exhibition in the French grouping...
...Karl Hofer's Boy with a Ball, done around 1925, exudes a certain eerie lightness amidst a foreboding darkness...
...Finally, Vaclav Spala's charming painting Peasant Woman (1912) reminded me of some of the'' folk art'' for which the region of Slovakia is known...
...There is little feeling of beatitude...
...There was frenetic activity in exploring new forms, new ways...
...It is austere with pointy and elongated figures...
...The Guggenheim is an appropriate place for such an exhibit as it is itself a monumental example of the best of modern architectural settings in which to see any exhibition of paintings, modern or otherwise...
...Dostoyevsky is demanding...
...The exhibition is divided into three categories: European, French, and-the highlight of the presentation-Czech painting...
...A lot was happening...
...Oskar Kokoschka, who although born in Austria was of partial Czech descent and lived in Prague in the 1930s, is represented by two paintings of the famous Charles Bridge in Prague...
...They are eclectic, coming from Prague, at that time a most eclectic center of the Austro-Hungarian empire...
...A man is depicted sitting at a table holding a volume of Dostoyevsky...
...On the wall hangs a crucifix...
...Emil Filla's Reading Dostoyevsky (1907) is intriguing...
...Kupka believed in painting "new structures . . . [which] have been created entirely by the artist himself.'' He did most of his work in Paris...
...Given prominence is his Synthesis, a large depiction of unrelated parts of a machine, done in monochromatic tones...
...While on view with their masters and contemporaries, they rank here as creators in their own right, specifically "Czech" artists from the region of Bohemia (Czechoslovakia also includes Moravia and Slovakia) and its capital, Prague, in the heart of "" Central Europe, a crossroad between East and West...
...But the special significance of the exhibition is that for the first time the American public will have the opportunity to see works by Czech artists never before shown in America-artists whose names are for the most part not known by us: Benes, Capek, Filla, Kubista, Kupka, Prochazka, Sima, Sala, and Zrzavy...
...On the other hand, Gustav Klimt's Virgin, done near the end of his life, reflects the ethereal freedom and mystical freshness of Vienna's Jugenstil (in Prague, called Secessionist) art and architecture, which was prevalent at the turn of the century...
...The European grouping gives an overview of the changes and developments in painting shortly before the turn of the century...
...Of the works shown here, all were done between 1907 and 1933-a period encompassing World War I, the demise of the empire, the formation of the Czechoslovak republic, and the rise of Nazism...
...The maiden is slumbering and sensuous in a sea of female flesh...
...The French grouping is dominated by Picasso and Braque, leaders of the so-called School of Paris, who dominated the movement and gave us Cubism...
...In the Guggenheim exhibit, Picasso's Nude Woman and Toreador Playing a Guitar are geometric puzzles done in greys...
...Anti-rationalism took hold in art as it did in the increasing social and political upheavals of the age...
...The Symbolists, the Expressionists, the Fauves ("the wild beasts," so-called by the critic Louis Vauxelles at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905), the Cubists, and nonobjective, nonrepresentational art, all were born at this period...
...The nine Czech painters in this exhibition represent two movements in modern Czech art known as the "Umelecka Besada" who were interested in modern urban life, and the "Manes'' who were rigidly experimental...
...Together they offer a fine representation of art in Prague at the beginning of the modern period...
...It is kaleidoscopic in form and color, and as I viewed it I wished there had been a whole series of such tableaux...
...Pictures of current works of art were becoming available, for example, and with them awareness of what was happening in the art world throughout Europe...
...The man looks dead, or at least exhausted...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
