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

6. Viktor Oliva: The Absinthe Drinker, after 1895. Whereabouts
unknown.

7. Anonymous: Photographie Portrait of Viktor Oliva, before 1896.
Repro: Květy, 18, 1896.


road from the recently completed Czech National
Theatre, which by now was holding regulär perform-
ances. One of these paintings, The Absinthe Drinker,
is well-known today [Fig. 6]. The famous drink had
been populär with bohemians in Paris since the mid-
nineteenth Century, and was later identified as one
of the common causes of degeneracy among the
lower classes. Czech absinthe began to be produced
in the 1880s, approximately at the same time the Café
Slavia opened. However, Oliva probably painted The
Absinthe Drinkerlong after he returned from Paris to
Prague in 1889. He painted a large triptych, An A (im-
age to Slavia, for the main room in the Café Slavia in
1895, depicting different Slavonie nations accompa-
nied by musicians. Most visitors to this middle-class
café would not hâve ordered absinthe, preferring
coffee with a bread roll. The Absinthe Drinker was
one of a sériés of five paintings whose whereabouts
today are unknown, and we can only speculate over
what these paintings depicted and where they hung
in the individual parts of the café.
Oliva’s painting depicts a solitary man in the
café, before whom there appears a petite, phantas-
mic woman the colour of absinthe, as a waiter ap-
proaches at closing time. The way the man is dressed
and the state he is in recalls some of the hallucinat-
ing figures Oliva portrayed in the aforementioned
Mahabharata album. A personal dimension to The
Absinthe Drinker can be found in photographs of
the painter himself. A rather formal portrait pho-

tograph présents Oliva as an acclaimed fine artist,
a role he aspired to but never really achieved. A
less formal albeit carefully arranged portrait shows
him resting his head on his hand in reflection or
melancholy, in line with traditional depictions of the
inspired artist [Fig. 7]. Here, however, Oliva exag-
gerates the pose in parody, or perhaps to emphasise
how weary he is of editing the book or magazine
in front of him. As in The Absinthe Drinker, here
too there is reading matter on the table, and the
glass to Oliva’s left looks very much like the glass
in the painting.
Viktor Oliva’s work represents an important com-
promise between bohemia and bourgeois society in
the visual culture of Prague. In the mid-1890s, how-
ever, artistic and intellectual circles began increasingly
to criticise this compromise. A generalised radicalism
and criticism mounted, especially in smaller periodi-
cals. Oliva and the Czechs who were successful in
Paris, Mucha and Marold, were also criticised by the
more radical Czech writers and artists. Some degree
of animosity towards these brilliant draughtsmen and
designers and their popularity among the fashion-
able Czech middle classes can also be found in the
magazine published by the Mánes Association of
Fine Artists, Volné směry (Free Currents). Originally
the magazine had combined a respect for the habits
of the educated middle-class magazine reader with
discussion of whatever was happening in culture
and the arts in Prague. Shortly thereafter it became

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