“BOHEMIAN” IN PRAGUE. BOHUMIL KUBIŠTA AS A SOCIAL CRITIC

• Authors: Eteanor F. Moseman
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The Czech artist Bohumil Kubišta (1884 – 1918) offers an example of the Parisian bohemian transposed into the tensions of class and ethnicity in Habsburg Prague. During two residencies in Paris between 1909 and 1910 Kubišta internalized the social envisioning of landscape and metropolis characteristic of much French modernist art. While in Paris, Kubišta – like his 19th-century artistic idols – sketched scenes of bustling street life, working-class entertainments, and urban labour. He transferred this roving eye for stratified social dynamics to local subjects in Prague and the surrounding countryside. Not satisfied to represent the merely beautiful, he strived to provoke his bourgeois viewer to contemplate the realities of class-based social dynamics in the political and social setting of Habsburg Prague. As a Paris-inspired bohemian in the streets of Prague, Kubišta rendered these class and ethnic tensions in scenes that reveal him as a critical observer of modern social life.

Keywords

EN

ARTIST; BOHEMIANISM; SOCIAL CRITIC; ETHNIC TENSIONS; KUBIŠTA BOHUMIL; PRAGUE; PARIS; SPIRITUALITY; WORKING CLASS

• Publisher: Institute of History of Art, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: ARS
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 155 – 169

Contributors

author

Eteanor F. Moseman

• Department of Art, Colorado State University, CD-1770, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1770, USA