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RUPTURE AND REFLECTION. ONE SKELETAL PATTERN FROM AROUND 1900

100%

Srp K.

Umění (Art)

2006

vol. 54

issue 3

252-260

The starting point of the study is Antonin Slavicek's painting 'The Cottage in Kamenicky' (1904), with its central motif of the mirroring of the cottage on the surface of the pond. The article looks at the role of reflection in painting and photography at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the main centres of European art. Treating specific examples, it points out the range of meaning and form, which, on the one hand, is defined for the senses by the potent example of mirroring, attracting the eyes, and on the other hand is defined conceptually by a contemplative balance, which captures the reflection in geometrical ideograms. The concept of the skeletal pattern is used to describe these contradictory approaches to a single motif. The role of this concept, deeply anchored in human thought, allows for a wide range of visualisation. The study demonstrates that before an individual perceives a state of nature, he or she has already been prepared to do so by the habits of consciousness, which form a relationship between the horizon and the two parts that it separates - the part above it and the part below it. The relation between these three components creates various possibilities, some of which may be suppressed or left out. Thus, a different correlation, which opened a way to go beyond realistic depiction, was introduced to the hanging painting and the photograph. This process of the transformation of the imitative depiction into abstraction took place very quickly. The reflection in a surface of water, which had been an integral part of landscape painting for many years, ceased to be an accompanying or secondary subject and became a theme of its own, contributing to the criticism of the realistic depiction. Three artists, Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt and Piet Mondrian, created model situations in this sense. In their work, the role of the skeletal pattern can be seen distinctly. The first two painters suppressed not only the situation above the surface, but the bank or horizon as well. Thus, all that emerged from the surface was an abstract space, a current that revealed action, independent of the cause of the reflection. Mondrian went even further: his ideas found expression in two methods at the same time. He suppressed the mirroring and consolidated the situation above the surface and below the surface in such a way that it was impossible to distinguish what was the upper and what the lower part. The hanging painting became a new unit, free from references outside itself. As soon as the skeletal pattern became a theme on its own, art was liberated from ties to the external motif. The path to the contemporary concept of the painting was opened up.

UNFAMILIAR POINTS. JOSEF SIMA, RICHARD WEINER AND THE GROUP 'LE GRAND JEU'

100%

Srp K.

Umění (Art)

2004

vol. 52

issue 1

11-36

One of the most productive artistic encounters between Czech modern artists and the emerging French avant-garde took place in the second half of the 1920s within the group 'Le Grand Jeu'. Members of the group were in close contact with the much older poet and journalist Richard Weiner, a long-time resident of Paris, and with the painter Josef Sima, who also lived in Paris from the beginning of the 1920s on. Sima came to be one of the key members of 'Le Grand Jeu', as well as one of its most important artists, at the centre of the group's journalistic and exhibition activities. There was a great similarity, in terms of outlook and theme, between the poetic and thematic work of René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte on the one hand and Richard Weiner on the other. They inspired one another and made a similar critique of rationalist civilisation, to which each of them brought his own experience and point of view to bear. They were particularly interested in the concept of paradise and criticised the simplified interpretation of the cognitive process as cerebral analytical judgement. Such judgement cut the contemporary individual off from contact with wholeness, miracles and grace, central concepts that 'Le Grand Jeu' tried to revive. In the extensive poetics, entitled The Barber-surgeon, which Weiner developed at the same time as the manifestos and other declarations of 'Le Grand Jeu', the contemporary individual, robbed of paradise, was distinguished from the surviving non-European cultures of primitive peoples. The latter were still living in paradise and the world of miracles, but were, paradoxically, unaware of these. After 1927, Sima became the main representative of these views in the visual arts. Contact with the representatives of 'Le Grand Jeu' opened up for him a 'second' sight, distinct from the purely sensuous sight that he had devoted himself to completely until then. Paintings such as 'Lightning', 'Double Landscape' and 'Meridian' in particular constitute key visualisations of the poetic and programmatic principles of 'Le Grand Jeu'. Although it resisted discursive approaches, in the end the group was compelled to turn to them in order to make its own programme comprehensible.

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RUPTURE AND REFLECTION. ONE SKELETAL PATTERN FROM AROUND 1900

UNFAMILIAR POINTS. JOSEF SIMA, RICHARD WEINER AND THE GROUP 'LE GRAND JEU'