Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the avant-garde and modernism. The impact of the First World War

0561583 - ÚDU 2023 RIV CZ eng M - Monography Chapter
Lahoda, Vojtěch
Transnational of National Cubism? Vincenc Kramář on Cubism.
Nationalism and cosmopolitanism in the avant-garde and modernism. The impact of the First World War. Prague: Artefactum, 2022 - (Gluchowska, L.; Lahoda, V.), s. 174-190. ISBN 978-80-88283-69-0
Institutional support: RVO:68378033
Keywords : nationalization of Cubism * national romantic movement * new state * aristocratic cosmopolitanism * democratic internationalism * emulation * national style * Legiobanka style * Czechoslovakia * Mitteleuropa * New Europa
OECD category: Arts, Art history

In 1918 the first President of Czechoslovakia, the philosopher and university pedagogue Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, wrote a short treatise, first in English and French in 1918, then in Czech and in German, entitled New Europe: A Slav Standpoint, in which he raised the question of the standing of the Czechoslovak nation in Europe. According to Masaryk, between nationality and internationality there is not conflict, but agreement, nations are the natural organs of humanity. Three years after the aforementioned publications of Masaryk's New Europe, the Prague art historian Vincenc Kramář who studied art history in Vienna, published a book entitled Kubismus [Cubism], in which he extensively explained the epochal significance of the works of Picasso and Braque. Kramář declared that „national art” would not be just the „pure fruit of domestic soil”, but must also be „comprehensible abroad” and „panhuman”. Kramář wrote these words in 1921, at a time when the young state had only three years of independent existence behind it and its dramatic problems barely resolved, these were daring ideas, and decidedly did not convey what enthusiastic nationalists (patriots) wished to hear. The author shows that Kramář's defence of Cubism as a synthesis of national and transnational significance was both a gesture and a manifestation.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0340812