Lectures

This article addresses the question of why, despite being a significant art metropolis, Prague plays a comparatively marginal role in global art history. By analysing the complex factors underlying the development of a modern yet consistently multicultural art metropolis around 1900, the reasons why Cubist and Surrealist art from the Czech Republic receives relatively little attention will be demonstrated. In particular, the analysis will examine issues related to the perception of time and space. Prague can only be understood as the setting for the most progressive European art movements from a heterotopic perspective, and modernism — within which the Secession, Art Nouveau and, in Prague above all, the activities of the Mánes Artists' Association must be situated — can only be analysed as a heterochronic phenomenon. This theory offers a new perspective on the development of modern art in Central Europe.

From this perspective, the philosophical and sociological aspects of the emergence of a specific artistic territory, such as Prague around 1900, can be examined. The fact that Prague, a notable creative metropolis, has not been included in the global art history canon is due to the marginalisation of cities outside imperial centres of power. However, it is time to decentralize art history and to examine, from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, the causes of isolation and exclusion from official, canonized art history, thereby highlighting the need to rehabilitate the actual state of art from a diachronic perspective.

JE : Les Mouvement Artistiques Sécessionnistes