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

9. Arnošt Hojbauer: Poster for the First Mánes Exhibition, 1898.
Prague, Museum of Décorative Arts. Photo: Archive of the museum.

for the hrst Mánes exhibition is a superb example
of deliberately shocking advertising, something that
has been ušed many times since the mid-nineteenth
Century to promote Contemporary art [Fig. 9], Unlike
most posters for exhibitions by independent artists
and art nouveau groups in Munich, Vienna and
Berlin, the Mánes poster did not try to dignify the
modernists by means of references to art’s traditional
iconography. It presented the obligatory conjunction
of muse and male protagonist rather differently than
Oliva had in The Absinthe Drinker. The association

meant the poster to be — and the public understood
it as — a provocative attack on the Czech nouveaux
riches, who neglected the role of patrons for their
nation’s artists.14
By the turn of the Century, the position of this
association of modern Czech artists had become a
complicated one. Some of the association’s leaders
forged links with the Czech bourgeoisie and Czech
and Austro-Hungarian politicians, and worked
with similar art associations in Vienna and Krakow.
However, among the leadership of Mánes and Volné
směry there was also a non-conformist element that
came out of bohemia’s radicalism. The génération
of artists who appeared in Prague around the be-
ginning of the twentieth Century had a particularly
confrontational attitude to the establishment. This
génération followed the example set in the world of
literatuře, and especially by the anarchist movement.
While the Austro-Hungarian monarchy did not
accept anarchism as a political movement, it toler-
ated it as a marginal utopian standpoint in the arts.
Anarchism, when understood as a rejection of the
obstacles presented by dass society’s power systém
to the development of universal creativity, coincided
with some of bohemia’s ambitions, and brought to
a culmination the long-standing arguments between
Czech artists and the Prague scene.
Among the older Czech painters, František Kup-
ka’s affinities lay with bohemianism and anarchism.
At the beginning of the twentieth Century he was
working in Paris as an Illustrator of satirical periodi-
cals that were critical of society, as well as luxurious
books.15 In Prague he became known for his cycles
of lithographs vilifying clericalism, militarism and
the supreme power of capital. One example of his
work published in Prague featured a striking varia-
tion on the motif of a swollen belly, familiär from
caricatures of the bourgeoisie since the times of
Honoré Daumier and featured in the poster for the
first Mânes exhibition [Fig. 10], Like other pioneers
of avant-garde art, for Kupka the revolutionary

14 For more information on the poster and the Contemporary
artistic and social context, and the debate over the exhibition’s
commercial failure, see PRAHL, R.: Plakát první výstav}' S VU
Mánes. Provokace mezi revoltou a utopií [The Poster for the
First Mánes Association Exhibition. Provocation between
Revolt and Utopia], In: Umění, 40, 1992, No. 1, pp. 23-36.

15 For a more recent in-depth study of Kupka’s work as a
satirist and Illustrator, see THEINHARDT, M. - BRULLÉ,
P. — WITTLICH, P.: Vers des temps nouveaux. Kupka, œuvres
graphiques 1894 — 1912. Paris 2002.

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