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Village Idyll (from Vítanov), oil on canvas, dated before the year 1910
He is a most beloved artist, the creator of more than 4,000 canvases. Yet he’s hardly known outside the Czech Republic.
He was taught by some of the Czech masters, among them Julius Mařak. Yet when other students went on to study the great masters in the world art centers of Florence and Paris, he retreated to the mountains of North Bohemia to paint quaint village life.
He had a nickname – “Mazbičky” (roughly, “little daubs”) – for what he called his badly-painted little landscapes. Yet they continue to appreciate and to sell comfortably for tens of thousands of Czech crowns today. Read more…
The brilliancy of Czech glass breached the gap in this dichotomy, and glass as an art form not only survived but flourished.
Glassmaking as a craft and as an art form goes back centuries in the Czech Republic. From the 11th through the 14th centuries, anonymous glass artisans invented bold new designs and forms of glass, proved in high demand throughout Europe. Yet, today these artisans’ identities remain a secret, forever lost in history.
In the mid-20th century, the use of glass as an expressive art form ground to a halt, as the political regime demanded that glass be used only for the most practical things – tableware, optics, windows. Yet somehow the Czech artistic spirit was not quashed; when the former glass artists were forced to become teachers, their insights and perceptions lived on in their students, and the two opposing and very different camps – politics and art – coexisted. The brilliancy of Czech glass breached the gap in this dichotomy, and glass as an art form not only survived but flourished.
But what is the status of glass art in the Czech Republic today? Again, another dichotomy of opposing forces: this time, it’s art vs. economics. The economic security assured by the former socialist government for glass production is now gone. Czech glass artists are left on their own, abandoned to struggle and compete as artists in a world economy.
Their actual numbers may be fluctuating, but the Czech glass artists’ spirit and creativity is flourishing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the youngest generation of artists. A new generation of secrets and dichotomies lives on in the fluid, expressive, crystalline medium of Czech glass in the hands of some of the youngest artists picking up the traditions, among them, Adéla Bébarová, Ivan Pokorný, Stanislav Müller, and Josef Šafařík.
