The establishment of Czechoslovakia had a significant impact on design and architecture

Prague - The establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia had the most pronounced direct reflection in applied arts and in what is now referred to as design. The formation of the state over 100 years ago also had a significant impact on architecture. This was related to the increasing role of this area of visual creation in the development of industrial society from the beginning of the 20th century, said art historian Milena Bartlová to ČTK. According to her, the mentioned fields allowed for the creation of a new visual environment that would express the new political and cultural reality.

“Czech society also had already established strategies for utilizing visual arts in the conflict of national emancipation with the Czech Germans, which it now expanded to cover the entire state - culturally understood as an extension of Bohemia,” she says. A whole direction, the national style, was even created to embody the democratic and Slavic character of the state. Besides large buildings like the Legiobanka in Prague designed by Josef Gočár, urban houses were also built across the republic in this style.

In graphic design, the most significant figure was František Kysela, who designed the stage set for The Bartered Bride in the national style. The processing of the emergence of Czechoslovakia in the visual arts peaked during the tenth anniversary in 1928, but some projects responding to the establishment of the state lasted several decades, such as the National Memorial in Prague on Vítkov.

The impact that the establishment of Czechoslovakia had on the visual arts was also related to the optimistic era of the 1920s and the belief that “the horrors of the Great War destroyed the old world, and now a new and better world is being built – including new art and new modern visuality.” It was similar after World War II, but with much greater skepticism, the historian notes.

Bartlová works at the AAAD (Academy of Art, Architecture & Design), and in 2015 she was the curator of the exhibition Building a State: The Representation of Czechoslovakia in Art, Architecture, and Design, which presented both the interwar and socialist republic through visual culture as a tool of state representation. She is also the guarantor of a similarly focused section within a large conference on the beginnings of the Czechoslovak Republic, which the Academy of Sciences will organize in October. It is meant to address how themes from the history of art and culture can contribute to a critical understanding of the Czechoslovak state.

The new state structure and organization embodied the building of new offices, their decoration with artistic works, the creation of promotional materials, but there was also free creation by visual artists. According to Bartlová, the history of art has not yet paid enough attention to commissioned work because it was automatically considered less valuable. “Which is of course not true. There is a large field for new research that is also continuing,” she stated.

According to her, the least explored area is paradoxically that of free creation, which would be a direct response to the emergence of Czechoslovakia. So far, it appears that if some artists immediately reflected the establishment of the state through their free work, they were rather those who do not belong to the authors of the modern canon, Bartlová argues. The last canvases of the Slav Epic by Alfons Mucha were a reaction to the establishment of the state, but at the time they stood in contrast to current artistic trends.

However, art created on state commission, according to the expert, was produced in quantity consistently throughout the existence of Czechoslovakia; during the socialist era, even pieces that are now counted under regional self-governance or orders from large enterprises were state commissions. “It would be mistaken to write off this entire part of creation as inferior. The idea that the state and quality art have nothing in common only took root after 1990,” she believes.

The topic deserves further research. “For example, in the former GDR, the category 'art on state commission' was worked with immediately from 1990, and it even succeeded in being collected in one collection. This was not the case here, so today it would be purely detective work,” she warns. But as the results of the well-known project Aliens and Herons, which focuses on small public plastics especially from the normalization period, show, it is not only about craft work, but also about the works of artists who today are counted among the highest quality, such as Eva Kmentová, Dalibor Chatrný, and many others.