Josef Gočár znovuobjevený. K nalezení části významného kubistického nábytkového souboru

Zprávy památkové péče 2014, 74(1):12-16

Josef Gočár rediscovered. On the findings of part of an important set of Cubist furniture

Daniela Karasová

After a brief recapitulation of Gočár's early (pre-Cubist) creations, the next step is to focus on the first presentation of Cubist furniture in the exhibition organized by members of the Mánes Union of Fine Artists (Skupiny výtvarných umělců Mánes) in the Municipal House in the autumn of 1912, designed by Josef Gočár. The exhibition featured Gočár's second dining room. Josef Gočár had designed a similar dining room for his own personal use a year earlier, together with bedroom furnishings. After this came a list of exhibitions abroad in which the Czech Cubists of the Mánes group presented both their free and useful art between 1912 and 1913 in Munich and Berlin. These efforts culminated in the Czech participation in the German Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, launched on 15 May 1914. The group's objective was to present the Czech art industry separately and not as a part of the Viennese exhibition. This proved possible due to the establishment of the Union of Czech Works by Jan Kotěra in the same year. Kotěra entrusted his student Otakar Novotný with the installation, resulting in the Cubist interior - dining room furnishings by Josef Gočár with a carpet and wallpaper by František Kysela, and ceramics by Pavel Janák displayed in a cupboard and greenhouse, as illustrated by period photographs in the introduction to the exhibition's publication from V. V. Štecha entitled "Čechische Bestrebungen um ein Modernes Interieur". The exhibition aroused great public interest and rightly so, but the outbreak of WWI led to its premature termination on 8 August 1914. The following years of war violence meant that the exhibition of Czech Cubism, or part of it, apparently did not return to Prague. All the more surprising was the discovery of Gočár's greenhouse, table, and four chairs with stickers from Prague customs nearly 100 years later, where it is still reverently kept.