Origin and destination

This extensive retrospective of the work of Josef Čapek (1887-1945) - the largest to date - contains key works from public collections and, more importantly, a large number of works from private collections that are practically unknown to the general public. It also introduces other aspects of Čapek's life and work, especially his literary activities.

Situated in the Prague Castle Riding School, the show is laid out almost like one of Čapek's Cubist works. The walls are painted in bright, rich colors with text excerpts (from published works and correspondence), and the display zigzags through a labyrinth of angled spaces.

To loosely paraphrase a quote by Čapek displayed at the entrance to the exhibition, man and the meaning of life are central to his work. But a deeper context - origin and destination - is crucial to understanding it. The origin of Čapek's working life was the factory, which he eventually fled to devote himself to art.

In terms of painting style, he drew on the various avant-garde styles of his day, from the Impressionistic In the Garden (1904), through the Neo-Impressionistic landscapes St. John Below the Rock I and II (1910) to the more Fauvist Firemen (1911), with other canvases showing influences of Symbolism. In the early part of the 20th century, Parisian Modernist currents flowed rapidly to Prague, intensifying for Čapek when he took up temporary residence in Paris in 1911.

Like many other Czech artists, Čapek embraced Cubism. The Factory (1912) is a simultaneous explosion and implosion, angular planes in rose and blue with several discernible smokestacks. Čapek's Cubist portraits and heads were distinctive from those of Picasso and Braque. In red, white and blue, Head (1913), Swimmer (1914) and Head of a Man (1914-15) are simplified, machine-like figures - like the modern conception of a robot, which is fitting, as it was Josef Čapek who invented the word, for the android figures in his brother Karel's play R.U.R., Rossum's Universal Robots.

As the First World War swept through Europe, anxiety suffused Čapek's work. Sadness and disquiet are palpable in works such as Anxiety (1915) and Street (1917). The thematic section Anxiety then segues into Fantomas, consisting largely of theatrical heads. Among them are Harlot (circa 1917), one of the pieces he deemed of low artistic value and asked his wife to destroy while he was interned in a concentration camp nearly three decades later. Indeed, it is not a strong painting; yet the same figure appears in another 1917 canvas and in illustrations for Apollinaire's Zone.

Amazement is the title of another section of paintings that Čapek filled with "simple truths and things close to people's lives." In this section are Flea (1916), depicting a girl flicking an insect off her shoulder, and two still lifes of a sewing box.

Works in the section titled Purity of Form show a more radical reduction of figures to pure geometry. A female figure with folded arms is simplified to a form similar to a perfume bottle; Sitting Woman from 1917 is a column of progressively smaller diamonds. Wrestler II (1915) consists purely of blocks. After the war, Čapek's figures begin to round out as he incorporated more of their personal environment. He also produced colorful still lifes and cityscapes, such as Periphery (1921), featuring a pile of newly delivered coal and laundry drying on a line.

In the interwar period, Čapek further simplified his figures, making them thinner and more curvilinear. Girl With a Flower Pot (1934) is essentially a stick figure with clothing in rounded geometric passages of color. Landscapes from this time are colorful and joyous. He paints children in a pure, naive manner. And he embraces village life as a theme, especially drawing inspiration from Orava. Two canvases, Girls Going for Milk (1933) and Girls on the Hill (1936), both feature four figures, painted progressively smaller, the faceless heads a composition of circles (in Milk) or diamonds (the girls' head scarves in Hill).

Anxiety creeps back into Čapek's work in the years leading up to World War II. Some paintings are looser and swirly, epitomized by Escape (In the Windstorm I) from 1935. The menacing Thundercloud from 1933 is similar to Munch's 1893 The Scream.

The show concludes with the section Fire and Desire, two late series which juxtapose triumphal women, solid and sturdy, surrounded by blazing colors, with more placid female figures gazing wistfully at the countryside.

Among Čapek's quotes throughout the show is the statement, "The artist has a moral responsibility to be free." His free expression, in word and image, led to his arrest by the occupying Nazis Sept. 1, 1939, after which he was transferred from one concentration camp to another. Finally, he was transported to Bergen Belsen in February 1945, where he apparently died in a typhoid epidemic in April of that year.

This retrospective, which, in addition to covering all phases of Čapek's visual art, presents him as a literary personality and a deeply thoughtful humanist, is a fitting tribute to this important Czech artist who had as many facets as one of his Cubist self-portraits.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com