Czech Secession
Art and Architecture 1890–1914
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In the 1890s in Prague, as in Munich, Vienna and Berlin, the activities of the Young Artists' Association developed as a "secession" from traditional artistic structures. Its main task was to promote new modern art. The Manes Artists' Association became the nucleus of a generational grouping and in 1896 began publishing its own periodical, Volne smery (Free Directions). From 1898, when it opened its first association exhibitions, it was already an unmistakable representative of Czech art culture. The main example for the artistic orientation of the association was contemporary France, helping to overcome local nationalistic interests, but the management of the magazine and the association, where the art and literary critic F. X. Salda, architect Jan Kotera, sculptor Stanislav Sucharda and painter Jan Preisler, followed the whole international art scene. The struggle for the fulfilment of the ideal of modern art then showed the full meaning of the term "Art Nouveau" when the next generation, emerging after Edvard Munch's groundbreaking exhibition in Prague (1905), provoked a crisis with its inclination towards the most recent cubism. This dramatic development of Czech art is traced as a gradual eradication of three main programmatic trends: the naturalistic-impressionistic, symbolist and ornamental-decorative tendencies. They were realized separately, but their mutual relationship gives Art Nouveau a deeper artistic meaning and disrupts the general perception, which usually understands Art Nouveau as an eclectic decorative style that faded away with the beginning of the 20th century.
