Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (45.2012)

genius, and followed the artisťs own interprétation
of himself as a Czech variation on the archétype
of the suffering artist. There are signs, however,
that Mânes’s mental illness towards the end of his
life was the resuit of syphilis, a disease that often
accompanied a life of dissipation. Nevertheless,
for his admirers from the younger génération of
Czech painters Mánes was the role model for the
new Czech art. An outstandingly talented figure
on the Prague art scene, Mikoláš Aleš, turned the
defence of Mánes into a rebuke to society for
failing to understand him, portraying Mánes as a
superhuman genius amidst a crowd in an image that
alluded to the story of Diogenes carrying a lamp in
the daytime, looking for an attentive listener [Fig.
3], In contrast, in a private caricature the “cosmo-
politan” Václav Brožík portrayed the aging Mánes
more realistically as a physical wreck.
Soon thereafter the figurai painter Mikoláš Aleš
and the landscape artist Antonín Chittussi came to
personify bohemianism in their work and lifestyle.
In the first half of the 1870s, the two artists visited
the Hungarian Puszta. Before and after their visit
this arid and sparsely populated plain was known as
somewhere to study nature directly, independently
of the academie conventions in art. The Puszta was
also a region of wandering people with a talent for
spontaneous music. The Hungarian Gypsies were an
inspiration for Chittussi and especially Aleš, who in
a sense modelled themselves after them. By 1880,
both painters were admired for the immediacy of
their art, but they continued to be criticised on the
grounds that their finished works feil short of aca-
demie standards.
In 1875 Aleš and Chittussi led students in an
attack on a professor at the Academy of Art, moti-
vated by an argument over the national character of
art. Both were expelled and imprisoned. This was
an incident without precedent on the Prague art
scene. Another similarly unusual case was when in
1878 the jury for the annual exhibition here refused
to display a large painting that Aleš painted at the
close of his studies at the Academy of Art. This
set-back meant that rather than pursuing a career as
an academie painter, Aleš became an Illustrator and
draughtsman for humorous and satirical magazines.
It was here that he published his drawings on the
theme of the failure of art critics and the public to


3. Mikoláš Aleš: Josef Mánes in Search of a Patron, 1880. Repro:
Šotek, 1, 1880.

understand art and Creative originality, in a séries
that glorified more recent figures in Czech literatuře
and art whose greatness had not been recognised by
their fellow Czechs: the poet Karel Hynek Mácha,
the writer Karel Jaromír Erben, and Josef Mánes.
Prior to this, Aleš had painted for his own purposes
a triptych where he depicted himself, the romantic
poet Mácha and a Gypsy musician [Fig. 4], These
three solitary figures in a landscape were meant to
personify Painting, Poetry and Music.
Mikoláš Aleš’s ambivalent position in the first half
of the 1880s was reflected in his conflicts over of-
ficial art commissions, a dispute over his contribution
to a work produced by two painters, and his defence
of the importance of spontaneity and originality in
art. These public disputes were also related to issues
of nationhood, and for Czechs they confirmed Aleš’s
assumption of the role of the suffering artist. In the

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