After several decades, Prague will
host again a large-scale exhibition of Slovenian Impressionism and other styles
that defined Slovenian cultural sphere between 1870 and 1930.
The exhibition Impressionism from Dawn to Dusk: Slovenian
Art 1870–1930, staged at Prague Castle,
features 474 exhibits which together speak of one of the most crucial
periods in Slovenian history, when art in our country was trying to catch up
with Europe not just stylistically but also institutionally – established were
the first market gallery, the University, and the National Gallery, all in the
capital city, Ljubljana.
In 1883, Vojtěch
Hynais painted the curtain for the big stage of the Czech National Theatre. In
the historical allegory featuring joint efforts in the construction of the
Czech national shrine of the Muses he included portraits of his fellow painters
and friends who helped him in the project, while in the aesthetic sense he
established the Paris-Prague axis. The curtain, which he finished in mere
ninety days, also tells the story of friendship between Hynais and the Slovene
painter Jurij Šubic (1855–1890). The two were acquaintances from their study
years in Vienna, they later collaborated in Paris, and both of them ardently
followed the Slavic idea. Collaboration of the two Šubic painters – also
Jurij’s elder brother Janez (1850–1889) – with Hynais, Václav Brožík, František
Ženíšek, and Mikoláš Aleš was so intense that in several cases it is impossible
to differentiate between the idiom of individual participants and it is
impossible even today to safely attribute several small-scale oil sketches to
this or that artist. The friends exchanged these tiny works among themselves,
gave them as gifts, copied them, etc. Regarded as one of the particularly
valuable items in the National Gallery of Slovenia’s collection is one of these
– Hynais’ oil sketch Study for the
painting The Death of Samson which is at present the only known document
about the missing canvas by this painter.
In the early decades of the 20thcentury Hynais was academy professor of Slovenian artists who, in the spirit of
enhanced national self-confidence, chose Prague for study instead of German or
Italian centres. Among these students were Ivan Vavpotič (1877–1943), Rihard
Jakopič (1869–1943), and Peter Žmitek (1874–1935). Sculptor Alojz Gangl
(1859–1935) settled in Prague for good and a great part of his oeuvre remains
in the Czech Republic until today. Before this, at the turn of the century, the
private painting school of the Slovenian painter Anton Ažbe (1862–1905) in
Munich was attended by Czech painters Emil Pacovský, Antonín Hudeček, Emanuel
Zamrazil, and Ludvík Kuba; the latter even made a picture of the interior of
Ažbe’s school. In 1910, a group of twenty-three Czech painters exhibited in
Ljubljana in the newly built art pavilion. The National Gallery of Slovenia
realized its first visiting exhibition abroad in the autumn of 1927 – in
Prague; five years earlier the Slovenian capital hosted an exhibition of the
Manés Society members and the following year also an exhibition of Czech
architecture. Such events carried on the connections that had been established
much earlier, for example by means of several medieval manuscripts, Parleresque
sculpture, music by Jacobus Gallus (1550–1591) and literature of Romanticism,
which can all be regarded as a continuous line, enhanced by the so-called
“tabor” movement in the latter half of the 19th century and in
visual art by the long span from Realism to the New Objectivity. Systematic
efforts for cultural contacts undoubtedly culminated in the work of architect
Jože Plečnik (1872–1957). He was professor and project designer in Prague from
1911 to 1921, and until the second half of the 1920s he was considered the
spiritual guide of the young generation of Czech architects. Affinity between
the Slovenes and the Czechs could be found in literature, theatre, authorial
music and musical performance, applied arts, the Sokol movement, Slavic
linguistics, and other scientific and scholarly disciplines.
The Czech-Slovenian mutuality
sprang from the need for a change of similar political circumstances in the two
lands within the frame of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, whereas the contacts
and exchange were encouraged by Slovenian graduates of Prague schools. Ivan
Zorman (1889–1969), the first head of the National Gallery of Slovenia, studied
at the polytechnic; generations of Slovenian Slavic scholars had been students
of the Prague university; composer and tenorist Fran Gerbič (1840–1917)
graduated from the conservatoire in Prague; Ivan Hribar (1851–1941), the
renowned mayor of Ljubljana and one of the initiators of the Neo-Slavic
movement, was the first ambassador of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
in the capital by the Vltava. The Czechs supported the Slovenes in establishing
national institutions, including the university, which celebrates its centenary
this year. The central statehood-sustaining buildings in Ljubljana were
designed by Czech architects. The palace of the National Gallery of Slovenia,
the former National Hall (Narodni dom), was designed and completed in 1896 by
the Czech František Edmund Škabrout. Among the architects who were invited to
Ljubljana, particularly by Hribar, were Jan Vladimír Hráský, Anton Hruby, Josip
Hudetz, and Vojtĕch Dvořák. A little less known remains the fact that the Czech
Adolf Liebscher executed the ceiling painting in the Provincial Theatre, the
present Opera House, in Ljubljana, and in 1892 he also designed the stage curtain
which is only known by an oil sketch kept in the National Gallery in Prague. In
memory of those times a number of streets in Ljubljana are named after Czech
patriots, artists and scientists.
Cooperation with the Czechs in
the spheres of culture in general and art specifically was of utmost importance
for the Slovenes and, as far as reliance on the Slavic world is concerned, it
goes farther back into the 19th century, to the time of national
awakening and the romantic drawing on the autochthonous, the folklore, which
mainly holds true of literature. At the time of Biedermeier, landscapist
and portraitist Pavel Künl (1817–1971) of
Mladá Boleslav settled in Carniola; he occupied an important role in the
preservation of Edward von Strahl’s collection, one of the prominent
aristocratic art collections in the Slovenian lands.
The art covered by the present
exhibition extends from realistic portrait and genre, through modernism, which
corresponds to Slovenian Impressionism,
and Art Nouveau, to the socially critical New Objectivity. The stated years
mark off the era of Slavic mutuality and the most intense contacts between the
Czechs and the Slovenes, in which visual art had a major role. The intermediate
time meant much more for the Slovenes than just a period of expansion of visual
art because, on the basis of rapid technological and economic development,
circumstances were ultimately formed for cultural identification of the
Slovenes as an independent ethnic community. Between the beginning of the
timeline with the Šubic brothers, Janez and Jurij, and their tie to the Czech
“National Theatre generation”, and its other end with the contemporaries Ivan
Vavpotič, Stane Kregar (1905–1973), France Kralj (1895–1960) and Tone Kralj
(1900–1975), who defined the third decade, artistic careers intertwined which
cannot be discussed without taking account of the two-way exchange between the
Czech and the Slovenian art scene.
Soon after 1870 Jurij Šubic
met Hynais in Vienna for the first time; in 1930 the declaration was issued on
the cultural-educational cooperation between the Czechs and the Slovenes.
Between these two years the events were focused on Ljubljana and its
surroundings. Changes in terms of form and content brought modern art to the
forefront in all fields of creativity. In the sphere of visual art, modernity
meant an alternative to the rigid academic practice from which modernists all
over Europe turned away in a number of secessionist movements. Soon after 1900
a group of Slovenian impressionists under the lead of Rihard Jakopič set up a
programme for achieving Slovenian artistic idiom which was identified as the
characteristic Slovenian landscape, while in terms of painting technique they
leaned on the Impressionist style. They also reorganized artistic life in
Ljubljana. The local milieu, however, did not warmly welcome the first
appearances of our impressionists; on the other hand, they were fervently
supported by the members of Slovenian literary Moderna, with the dramatist and
prose-writer Ivan Cankar and the poet Oton Župančič at the head. After the
successful 1904 exhibition in the Miethke Salon inVienna their reputation grew
also in their homeland. The notion of Slovenian
Impressionism got anchored so firmly that it became a synonym for Slovenian
art and for artistic quality, hence in spite of its often insufficiently
adequate stylistic characterization the syntagm continues to be used as a
technical notion. It contains a wider palette of terms and an unusual range of
visual expressions which co-existed: pleinairism, Impressionism,
Post-Impressionism, Divisionism, symbolism, Intimism, Art Nouveau, early colour
expressionism.
Several
Slovenian artists, slightly younger than our impressionists, linked up in a
group named Vesna (Spring). They were particularly successful in the fields of
illustration, book design, and caricature. Outstanding among them is Hinko
Smrekar (1883–1942) with his socially critical note and stylistic perfection.
The overview ends with the
generation of expressionists who consolidated in the years after the Great War
and outlined a new direction of development. This period was marked by the
tragic war experiences, the rise of fascism and the threat of a new clash as
well as increasing national friction on the Slovenian western and northern
border.
In the six decades that are covered
by the present exhibition and its catalogue the response area of Slovenian
visual culture was created, and the painters – the Slovenian impressionists,
their fellow artists, forerunners and followers
– ensured greater visibility of Slovenian art. The exhibition features
visual art, but it also tells about the real environment, the spiritual,
political and social situation of the society in the period between 1870 and
1930, about the nation’s identity, cultural
charge and artists of the time when a certain period was coming to an end and a
new world was arising. The national cultural identity of an individual is not a
constant but it varies through history. Today, it is shaped by globalization
processes, information flow, reduced distances. The cultural identity of
Slovenes is undoubtedly based on the period presented at the current
exhibition: on the painters Ivan Grohar (1867–1911), Jakopič, Matej Sternen
(1870–1949), Matija Jama (1872–1947), Maksim Gaspari (1883–1980), Smrekar; on
architects Ivan Vurnik (1884–1971) and Plečnik; on writers France
Prešeren, Cankar, Župančič – with them we even nowadays, within the European
community, justify our otherness and our connectedness with the fellow citizens
of the Union. However, part of the cultural identity of a present-day
inhabitant of Slovenia is also occupied by their contemporaries Monet, Sisley,
Hynais, Zuloaga, Brožik, Klimt, Baudelaire, Zolà, and numerous other artists.
We sincerely believe that the universal language of art can be the strongest
bond between the nations and the best way to know and understand each other.
For this reason, dear visitors to the exhibition and readers of the catalogue,
we are presenting you in the city, which is – and was – one of the world’s
capitals, the best selection of our heritage and we kindly invite you to accept
it as part of your world and your cultural identity, too.
Dr. Barbara Jaki, Director
Exhibition
Exhibition concept
Barbara Jaki
Realization of the concept
Mateja Breščak, Barbara Jaki, Michel Mohor, Alenka
Simončič, Andrej Smrekar
Texts by
Mateja Breščak, Igor Grdina, Barbara Jaki, Michel
Mohor, Damjan Prelovšek, Alenka Simončič, Andrej Smrekar
English translation
Alenka Klemenc, Michel Mohor, Andrej Smrekar
Czech translation
Jana Šnytová, Dagmar Šober
Conservation-restoration treatment of exhibits
Tina Buh, Andrej Hirci, Danaja Padovac, Miha Pirnat, Erica Sartori,
Simona Škorja, Martina Vuga, Monika Zobec
Architecture photographs:
Bildarchiv Belvedere, Wien
Miran Kambič
Damjan Prelovšek
Exhibition design
Vladimír Kosik
Graphic design and realization of the exhibition
Spyron Design, s.r.o.
Realization of staging
Design By Hy, s.r.o.
Promotion of the exhibition
Katarína Hobzová
Exhibition producer
Andrea Hozáková
Owners of exhibits
Archbishopric, Ljubljana
Association of Free Trade Unions of Slovenia
Božidar Jakac Art Museum, Kostanjevica na Krki
Jakac House, Museum of Dolenjska, Novo mesto
Kamnik Intermunicipal Museum, Miha Maleš Collection
KRKA, d.d., Novo mesto
Krško Cultural Centre
Ljubljana City Library, Slovanska Library
Mane nobiscum Home for Elderly Priests, Ljubljana
Maribor Art Gallery
Miran Jarc Library, Novo mesto
Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana
Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Plečnik House
Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana
Museum of Gorenjska – Cabinet of Slovenian Photography,
Kranj
Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana
National and University Library, Ljubljana
National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana
National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana
Parish Church of St. Francios of Assisi, Šiška, Ljubljana
Parish Church of St. James the Great, Kostanjevica na Krki
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Trnovo, Ljubljana
Parish Church of St. Peter, Preddvor
Parish Church of St. Peter, Radovljica
Parish Church of St. Stephen, Gomilsko
Pilon Gallery, Ajdovščina
Prague Castle Administration (Správa Pražského hradu)
Private collections: Klegenfurt, Vienna, Celje,
Ljubljana, Prague, Velenje
Republic of Slovenia, Constitutional Court
Republic of Slovenia, Parliament
Slovene Museum of Christianity
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
St.
Stanislav's Institution, The Kregar Gallery, Ljubljana
Stična Cistercian Abbey
Theological Seminary, Ljubljana
Vladimir Štoviček Collection, Krško Cultural Centre,
Krško
Catalogue
Catalogue concept
Barbara Jaki, Andrej Smrekar
Editors
Katarína Hobzova, Andrej Smrekar
Texts by
Mateja Breščak, Igor Grdina, Barbara Jaki, Michel
Mohor, Damjan Prelovšek, Alenka Simončič, Andrej Smrekar
Czech translation
Jana Šnytová, Dagmar Šoberová
English translation
Alenka Klemenc, Michel Mohor, Andrej Smrekar