Masterpieces from the Collection of Česká spořitelna
September 7th–November 19th 2017
Česká spořitelna is the oldest bank across the Bohemian, Moravian and Silesian territory. It was founded in 1825 in Prague and it was the second bank across the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Soon after the first Česká spořitelna was launched in Prague, hundreds of its branches emerged across the Bohemian and Moravian territory. Their founders were chiefly motivated by the conviction that each and every local office would benefit customers, traditionally ignored by the world of finance: ordinary people and small business. As millions of people migrated to cities in search of a livelihood and opportunity, the Bank was there to help them reap the fruits of their labors and save for retirement. At the time, this simple concept was revolutionary. Its extraordinary success allowed the Bank to expand its mission to enhance and cultivate the spirit of the common man. This endeavor was crowned by the Rudolfinum, built by the Česká spořitelna to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its existence. The Rudolfinum became the nation’s shrine of music and art. Tightly woven into the fabric of community life, savings banks supported homegrown artists by purchasing their works, nurturing cultural awareness among the local population.
The paintings and drawings presented in this exhibition have been selected from the branches of Česká spořitelna across Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. Although they were originally purchased to decorate financial institutions, they make up a striking overview of Czech art of the mid-19th to mid-20th century.
The core of the collection lies in the landscape, genre that underwent in the above mentioned period a rapid, dramatic development in Bohemia and the rest of Europe. The oldest painter presented here is August Bedřich Piepenhagen, a German painter settled in Bohemia, whose work suggests early Romanticism. Since the early 19th century, the bastion of art academia in Bohemia had been the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. On its soil, the Romanticist landscape reached its prime, with German painter Maximilian Haushofer heading the landscapist department from 1844 to 1866. The canvases of his pupils, Alois Bubák, Adolf Kosárek, Hugo Ullikand Antonín Waldhauser are true masterpieces.
After Haushofer died, the landscape studio was abolished and landscape was no longer on the Prague Academy’s curriculum. Thirteen years later, in 1879, this situation prompted Antonín Chittussi to set out for what was then the artistic heart of Europe: Paris. Although his arrival in the French capital coincided with the first Impressionist exhibition, he fell in love with the Impressionists’ predecessors – the Barbizon School artists like Theodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, and Camille Corot. All of them rejected the artificially composed ideal landscape. They strove to capture the actual landscape scene, painting outside in the open air (en plein air). The result was relaxed brushwork and blurred boundaries between a sketch and a finished product. Quickly absorbing and adopting these principles, Chittussi laid the foundations for modern Czech landscape painting. His posthumous exhibition of 1892 had a profound effect on the young generation.
A significant shift took place in Prague in 1887, when the Academy of Fine Arts invited Julius Mařákto revive the landscape school. Mařák’s oils and large format drawings signaled the transition from Romanticism to Realism, but his teaching activity also contributed to the direction of Czech art. During his twelve years at the helm of the landscape studio, astrong generation of artists emerged. Their ranks in the collection of Česká spořitelna are robust: Ferdinand Engelmüller, Otakar Lebeda, Jan Honsa, Jaroslav Panuška, Ota Bubeníček, Alois Kalvoda, František Kavan, Karel Langer, Stanislav Lolek, František Pečinka, and Josef Ullmann. Antonín Hudeček joined them in their en plein air sessions.
The young artists who burst onto the art scene in the 1890s wanted to liberate Czech art from its isolation and make it relevant in all of Europe. It was no easy task. Typically, their financial situation did not allow for an extensive stay or studies in Paris, and information about new artistic directions entered Bohemia with delay and often indirectly. For instance, a true discussion discussion about Impressionism only began in Prague in 1899 with an exhibition by Václav Radimský, apainter active in Giverny in the vicinity of Claude Monet. At the turn of the century, conservative landscapist painters, Karel Liebscher and Vácslav Jansa, were very popular among the general public.
In Bohemia, Impressionism became firmly rooted only by the end of the first decade of the 20th century. It was Mařák’s pupils who relentlessly advanced the progress of landscape painting. Some, such as Alois Kalvoda or Ferdinand Engelmüller, even ran private landscape schools, producing a new generation of landscape painters.
A new tide rushed to the art scene with a large group of artists born in the last two decades of the 19th century. After graduating from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts or the Academy of Applied Arts and Architecture, some traveled or opted for prolonged stays abroad. Thus grew the range of artistic styles. In addition to strong domestic tradition, embodied predominantly by Antonín Slavíček, their work was informed by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Some examples are the landscapes of Ludvík Kuba, František Cína Jelínek, Gustav Porš, Gustav Macoun, and Oldřich Blažíček. The canvases of other strong personalities, such as Emil Artur Pittermann – Longen, Václav Špála, Jindřich Prucha, Jan Trampota, and Otakar Nejedlýdemonstrate the impact of new styles: Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and the style of Paul Cézanne. Vlastimil Rada’s and Karel Holan’s urban and urban periphery views stood out as well.
Sharing space with the well-known painters have been artists associated with given regions, whose work fell into oblivion during the post-World War Two era. They were: Richard Lauda, Adolf Träger, Jiří Probošt, Josef Krejsa, and Viktor Klen in Southern Bohemia; Bedřich Andrle, Zdeněk Nemastil, and Jindřich Šimekin Šumava; Karel Jan Sigmundin Železné hory and Vysočina (Highlands); and Richard Fleissnerin northern Bohemia. An important art center was established in the early 20th century in Moravia. Alois Schneiderka, Joža Uprka, Antoš Frolka, Ludvík Evžen Ehrenhaft, and Josef Koudelka were active in Moravian Slovakia; František Hlavica and Emil Josef Nečas worked in Wallachia.
Though figure paintings are rarer than landscapes in the collection of Česká spořitelna, they bear the names of illustrious artists. The generation active in the decoration of the National Theatre is represented here by the oils of Václav Brožík, Vojtěch Hynais, Emanuel Krescenc Liška, František Ženišek, and the unique drawing studies by Jakub Schikaneder. In the late 19th century, these artists taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts, raising anew generation of painters organized around Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes. Česká spořitelna owns works by Max Švabinský, Jan Preisler and Viktor Stretti – all of whom significantly influenced modern Czech art.
During the last two decades of the 19th century, the Czech art scene was a rich and diverse mosaic of styles and currents. At the annual exhibitions organized by Krasoumná jednota (Fine Arts Union) in the halls of the Rudolfinum, the canvases of young artists such as Luděk Maroldand Josef Douba shared walls with paintings by academic and salon painters František Beneš Knüpferand František Dvořák. The conservative taste of financial institutions favored František Jakuband Karel Špillarwhose academic paintings reflected the waning Art Nouveau Decorativism until the late 1930s.
Aspecial part of the collection is the set of proposals for the decoration of the House of Artists – the Rudolfinum Hall. The building with aconcert hall and exhibition space was built in 1875–1881 by Böhmische Sparkasse, the oldest bank in Bohemia, under the auspices of Crown Prince Rudolf. The competition to decorate the Hall was declared in 1890 and a year later the results were announced. The first two places went to Viennese artists Eduard Veithand Julius Schmid, and third prize was awarded to Adolf Liebscher. This outcome met with the disapproval of the professional public and the decorations were never realized.
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