Marie Rakušanová – författare

Czech Cubism is one of the most important contributions of modern Czech art to world culture. These works, created approximately between 1910 and 1935, embrace painting, drawing, graphic art, collage, sculpture, architecture and applied art, and the movement’s leading lights – including painters Emil Filla and Bohumil Kubišta, sculptor Otto Gutfreund and architect Pavel Janák – were among the most exciting practitioners of Cubism anywhere in the world. The Gallery of West Bohemia is home to one of the most important collections of the best Czech Cubist art, painstakingly assembled since the early 1960s. The artworks included here have played a vital role in rehabilitating the avant-garde in a country where modernist art had suffered decades of political repression. As such, the collections of the Gallery of West Bohemia have been crucial to the revival of the domestic art scene in Bohemia and beyond, and continue to inspire contemporary Czech artists. This book, expertly compiled by Gallery Director Roman Musil and his team, introduces some of the finest works of Czech Cubism to an international audience.

In Degrees of Separation, scholars from the Czech Republic, Canada, Germany, and Hungary take a new approach to exploring the work of one of Central Europe’s most interesting modernist painters, Bohumil Kubišta. While many art historians have viewed Kubišta’s work solely in the context of an idealized Czech canon, Kubišta did not identify with a nation-state clearly defined by ethnicity, language, or territorial reach.Taking a transnational approach that incorporates thorough topographical research, the authors attempt to redraw the map of European modernism by exploring the artist’s subversive approach to the stylistic currents of his time. The book reveals the complex relationships within early twentieth-century Europe, as Kubišta and other Central European artists tried to balance their admiration for the dominant artistic trends coming out of Paris with their desire to find alternative forms of expression arising from local artistic and intellectual sources. The richly illustrated book features a wealth of documentation, including an exhaustive timeline with notes, a comprehensive inventory of Kubišta’s works, and an up-to-date exhibition list.