Among those who interest themselves in modernism in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prague is sometimes referred to as the “second city of cubism.”Footnote 1 In 1911, at a time when the style was still largely unknown in Europe, an artists’ group devoted to the defense and promotion of the new art was founded in Prague. The members of the Skupina výtvarných umělců, or Visual Artists Group, wrote extensively about cubism in their journal Umělecký mesičník [Art Monthly] as well as in other publications. They sponsored numerous exhibits of the art at home and participated in shows of Czech cubist art abroad. In February 1914, Prague was the site of the largest show of cubist art anywhere in the world up to that time.Footnote 2
As in France, painting was the most important medium for the Czech cubists, but their most original contributions came in architecture and design. Only in the Bohemian Lands was there a sustained effort to articulate cubist ideas in these fields. In the few years between 1911 and the start of World War I, numerous cubist projects were realized in Prague and elsewhere in Bohemia, ranging from private homes to apartment blocks, from commercial buildings to, in one case, a sanatorium. Cubist ideas were also applied successfully to the decorative arts, particularly to furniture and ceramics, initiating an imaginative new design tradition. In the years after World War I, a style derivative of prewar cubism, rondo-cubism, became something like the national architectural style. The avid interest in cubism in Prague prompted no less an authority on the subject than Guillaume Apollinaire to remark in 1914 that due to their embrace of the style, “the Czechs have moved to the forefront of the modernist movement.”Footnote 3
While art historians have long recognized Prague as an important center of cubist art, in recent years the phenomenon of Czech cubism has received much more widespread scholarly and public attention. Dozens of exhibitions of the art have been held throughout Europe and the United States, and even more publications on the subject have appeared. What has not been noted in the literature, however, is that among its Czech practitioners and advocates, the style was conceived in highly gendered terms. To put it simply, cubism had a sex and it was male.
Cubism was gendered in this way because the whole of the Czech pre-World War I modernist artistic movement, of which cubism was the most important part, was imagined in male terms. Postimpressionist painting in general was thought of as male (though there were some differences of opinion), so was architecture that rebelled against the ornamentation and decorativity of the Secession. Poetry and literature that sought to transcend the aestheticism and decadence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were conceived in male terms, too. And if these artistic practices were gendered male, so were their practitioners. The artists associated with the Czech prewar modernist movement were more or less exclusively men in any event, but they made a point of their masculinity. One such figure, the theater director and critic Josef Kodíček (1892–1954), wrote: “What strikes me most about this group of people is their masculinity, often ungraceful and rough, their resistance to pathos and aestheticism, their self-conscious theoretical and philosophical radicalism, and their fundamental resistance to imitation and to the repetition of tradition.”Footnote 4 By “this group of people,” Kodíček meant the prewar modernist artistic generation. In the same essay, he described members of this generation as “real men.”Footnote 5
Why was cubism and Czech prewar modernism as a whole conceived in such highly gendered terms? Why was it so important for the figures of the prewar modernist movement to assert their manliness, as well as the maleness of their art? And what in their minds made their art “masculine” rather than “feminine”? In this essay, I argue that this gendering was an attempt by Czech artists to claim for themselves a privileged position of harmony in relation to modern life, one that distinguished them from their generational predecessors, as well as from their counterparts elsewhere in Austria-Hungary. If art and artists deemed “feminine” were disparaged as out of touch with the times, as alienated from the modern world, and as concerned only with inner life and subjective experience, then “masculine” art was art that did not retreat from the technological, material, and social realities of the modern world but affirmed and embraced them. “Male” art was art at one with the times, art that reflected and embodied the spirit of the age. To the Czechs, to be a “man” meant to plunge headlong into modern life, to tear down that which stood in its way, but also, crucially, to give it new shape and form.
In advancing these claims, the artists of the prewar modernist movement were reacting in part to an earlier generation of modernist artists, active mainly in the 1890s and early 1900s, who, in rebellion against a positivistic and materialistic culture that seemed to value art only for its exchange value, withdrew into a more rarefied aesthetic realm, free to pursue their creative activity unhindered by external constraints. Normally referred to as aestheticism or art-for-art's sake, this attitude encompassed a range of artistic movements and isms including, typically, decadence and symbolism. Since, as Rita Felski has argued, the culture of bourgeois materialism and rationalism against which the aesthetes of the 1890s were rebelling was generally understood as masculine, the revolt against it was often associated with femininity.Footnote 6 While some artists and writers engaged in a self-conscious exploration of their own internalized femininity, the aestheticist emphasis on inner life and subjective experience, as well as on artifice and the psychological struggles of the unique individual, also became linked to femininity.Footnote 7 In their bid for artistic freedom, the aesthetes and decadents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made a virtue of their distance from the world of bourgeois rationality and utility, as well as from the coarseness and vulgarity of everyday life. But the price of this autonomy was necessarily a disconnection from the more concrete material and social realities of the age. It was precisely against aestheticism's “feminine” distance from modern life that the Czech prewar modernist generation was rebelling.
In this sense, the Czech prewar modernists shared much in common with the Italian Futurists, with whom, indeed, they were often compared.Footnote 8 Although the ambitions of Futurism were multifarious and complex, if it was nothing else Futurism was a rejection of aestheticist withdrawal and an attempt to reconnect art to a mass audience and to modern industrial civilization. The Futurists noisily advertised their contempt for contemporary culture, which they perceived as thoroughly feminized, and were forthright about their intention to re-masculinize it. In Futurism's founding manifesto, F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944) extolled traditionally male virtues—action, aggression, violence—while simultaneously trumpeting his “scorn for woman.” He famously declared: “We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”Footnote 9 Lest this passage be interpreted exclusively as an expression of Marinetti's misogyny, the scholar of Italian Futurism Walter Adamson reminds us that “ ‘scorn for women’ [sic] was a rejection not of women as a biological category, but of the discursive position that the feminine had come to assume in fin-de-siècle life.”Footnote 10 Adamson notes that Marinetti was in fact a strong supporter of women's rights.Footnote 11 Indeed, it was the female Futurist poet Valentine de Saint-Point, who, in her own “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman,” most clearly captured the movement's attitudes about gender and modern culture. Denouncing the current age as one in which femininity predominated, she opined: “What is most lacking in women and men alike is masculinity….To give back a certain masculinity to our peoples benumbed by femininity, they must be dragged to masculinity, even to brutality.”Footnote 12 Like the Czech prewar modernist movement, Futurism was imagined as an unambiguously masculine endeavor—even by its female adherents.
The similarities in the gendered conception of Czech prewar modernism and Italian Futurism are striking and notable, but if both shared a reactive opposition to the “feminized” aestheticism of the turn of the century, the nature of this opposition was also specific to their national contexts. The “maleness” of the Czech prewar modernist movement may have been part of a wider European reaction against aestheticism, but in its particulars it was closely connected to the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary. As such, it highlights features of Prague's Czech cultural milieu that distinguish it from Vienna and Budapest.
Drawing on Carl Schorske's influential thesis about the withdrawal by Viennese artists and intellectuals of the fin de siècle into private worlds of the self as a consequence of their alienation from their public life,Footnote 13 I argue that the artists of the Czech prewar modernist generation, unlike so many of their counterparts elsewhere in the empire, felt no such alienation and therefore no need to flee their external environment into the protective shelter of the self. If the “inward turn” in Vienna was associated with femininity,Footnote 14 then the “outward turn” of the Czechs was linked to masculinity. Secure in their feelings of national belonging and in their social identity, ambitious and self-confident, this generation of Czech artists was uncommonly optimistic about modern life and about their prospects within it. Their “masculinity” was a way of asserting their sense of ease in the modern world and a sign of their determination to reorient outward the inward gaze of aestheticism and the Secession. They turned to cubism because it seemed to promise a way out of a feminized garden of the self.
If the Czech modernists acknowledged the intersection of their project with that of the Futurists, then they also noted key differences, and these extend to their conception of masculinity. Like the Futurists, the Czechs linked their frontal assault on aestheticism (and other artistic conventions) to masculinity, but they also insisted on the creation of new artistic forms to replace those that had been destroyed, contrasting their aspiration to a “new formalism” with Futurist “formlessness.” To them, modernist masculinity was constructive as well as destructive; “real men” forged new forms in addition to smashing old ones. And while the Czechs also linked their masculine sensibility to their national revival, they rejected out of hand the belligerent nationalism of the Futurists. The Czech modernists were undoubtedly motivated by feelings of competition with and the desire to differentiate themselves from their German compatriots, but they never associated nationalist militancy with masculinity. All this may help to explain why the Czech modernists, despite the vehemence of their masculinist rhetoric, were not, like the Futurists, drawn to Fascism in the years after World War I. The aggressive masculinity of the Futurists has often been taken as an indicator of their proto-Fascism,Footnote 15 but no such equation exists for the Czech prewar modernist generation. The Czech example demonstrates that a rhetoric of aggressive, even violent, masculinity cannot be linked automatically to any particular political trajectory. The way masculinity is conceptualized matters more than the stridency of its assertion.
***
A note on methodology is perhaps appropriate here. Unlike many investigations into the subject of masculinity and modern culture, this essay does not explore the behavior toward women of the male artists of the Czech prewar modernist movement, nor does it seek to expose their (readily apparent) sexism.Footnote 16 It does not interpret the assertive masculinity of these artists as a response to the threat of female emancipation or female encroachment on traditionally male spheres of activity, though this may very well be part of the dynamic.Footnote 17 Nor does it take a biographical approach, seeking to determine if the insistent masculinity of the artists of this generation was driven by a subjective sense of gender crisis, as indeed it may have been.Footnote 18 It resists as well interpreting the Czechs’ masculinist rhetoric in terms of a general European “crisis of masculinity,” even though the case for such a crisis is compelling.Footnote 19 Nor, finally, does it attempt to interpret the products of the prewar generation's creative imagination—their novels, poems, paintings, architectural proposals, etc.—for insight into their notions of masculinity or femininity, despite the fact that such analysis may be especially revealing.
All these are valuable strategies that might fruitfully be pursued with respect to these artists, but they are not my approach. Instead, I am interested above all in the discursive position of masculinity and femininity in the Czech modernist imagination, and I restrict my analysis to the gendered rhetoric of artistic and cultural development, that is, to self-conscious claims about the masculinity and femininity of differing artistic movements. As such, my source material is drawn overwhelmingly from the Czech modernists’ critical writings on contemporary cultural life. The figures of the prewar modernist generation wrote extensively about developments in modern culture, and when they did, they often resorted to highly gendered language as a way of sharpening contrasts and clarifying differences. What they meant when they deemed certain artistic forms to be “masculine” and others “feminine” and why they were so committed to the idea of the masculinity of their own endeavors is what I seek to understand in this essay.
Manly and Unmanly Art
In what ways was Czech prewar modernism imagined as male, and what was the content of its masculinity? The most typical way of asserting the maleness or masculinity of this art was by contrasting it to a range of styles, movements, and qualities deemed to be female or effeminate. This transaction was especially clear in discussions of literary modernism. The writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938), for example, who later became famous as the author of the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920) and the novel War with the Newts (1936), but who in the years before World War I was just a young literary upstart active in modernist circles, described the first task of his generation as that of “sorting out the fight with the decadence, aestheticism, and subjectivism of the fin-de-siècle.”Footnote 20 He characterized his generation's program as a “turn away from moody impressionism, from symbolism and decadence; poetry was supposed to be more direct, more objective, in a sense more manly.”Footnote 21
Another observer, the literary critic František Götz (1894–1974), offered more or less the same assessment, claiming that the writers of the prewar modernist generation directed their sharpest attacks against “the feeble poetic subjectivism found in the poetry of passive moods and effeminate crises of feeling, against spurious aestheticism, against decorativity.”Footnote 22 Referring by name to Josef Kodíček, Götz maintained that his critical work was “masculine, hard, intellectually acute, and aesthetically uncompromising.” He added: “Masculinity was his basic premise. Masculinity—that is, above all healthy skepticism, resistance to pathos and sentimentality, a sense for reality and individuality.”Footnote 23 These statements by Čapek and Götz, along with the one by Kodíček cited above, were made retrospectively, looking back on the prewar modernist movement from the perspective of the 1920s and 1930s. All of the other evidence presented in this essay comes directly from the prewar years, but I begin with these later remarks because they speak so directly to the gendered distinctions at issue.
It should be clear that for these commentators, decadence, aestheticism, symbolism, subjectivism, impressionism, passivity, moodiness, pathos, and decorativity are all associated with femininity. Directness and objectivity, roughness or hardness, intellectual acuity, theoretical and philosophical radicalism, skepticism, realism, and individualism, on the other hand, are tied to masculinity. Masculinity is determined as well by the implicit or explicit negation of all that is female: activity instead of passivity, originality instead of the repetition of tradition, emotional steadiness as opposed to moodiness or crises of feeling, a lack of grace, a rejection of decorativity. These male/female binaries are all familiar reflections of culturally pervasive stereotypes; none is particularly original or unique to this generation of artists. The most common refrain, however, involves the opposition of masculine art to decadence and aestheticism. This crucial polarity requires additional examination.
Unmanly Art: Decadence and Aestheticism
The problem with these literary forms in the minds of the writers of the prewar modernist generation, and ultimately what made them feminine, is that they were turned away from the realities of modern life. Decadents and aesthetes were said to conceive of art as something superior to and distant from life, indeed, as the antithesis of everyday life. Whereas life was short, brutal, and mediocre, art was the realm of the eternal, the beautiful, and the sublime. If the decadents and aesthetes of Czech literature had severed art from its roots in life, then the writers of the prewar modernist generation would revivify art—and re-masculinize it—by reconnecting it with life.
The writers of the prewar generation singled out many of their predecessors for rebuke, but their preferred foil was undoubtedly Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic (1871–1951), probably the best-known decadent writer of the period. Dubbed by his critics the “king of poseurs,” sex and death were among his favored themes.Footnote 24 He wrote about free love, homosexuality, and necrophilia; he glorified death, transience, and decay. In protest against the banality and mediocrity of modern mass life, Karásek conjured up an exclusive aesthetic sphere determined only by his subjective desires. His was a world of isolated, aristocratic individuals, cut off from common social relations and from everyday life. There, his characters cultivated their private fantasies and indulged their wildest passions. It was a bizarre and exotic world of mystics, demons, poisoners, and magicians.Footnote 25 In a review of one of Karásek's novels, the writer and painter Josef Čapek (1887–1945), a key figure of the prewar modernist movement, described his older peer's books as “perverse,” “infertile,” “passive,” “decorative,” and simply “dead.”Footnote 26 But the fundamental problem with his art, according to Čapek, was that it “runs away from life.”Footnote 27 It had nothing to do with the world outside the self; it was wholly absorbed in the concerns of a private, subjective space.
The same criticism was leveled at aestheticism. If Josef Čapek made clear his distaste for decadent literature, the most militant opponent of aestheticism was undoubtedly the poet Stanislav K. Neumann (1875–1947), one of the most talented and outspoken figures associated with the prewar modernist generation.Footnote 28 In a 1913 essay, Neumann wrote, “[t]he enemy of modern art is less the intractability and incomprehension of the general public than aestheticism.” “Violà l'ennemi!” he declared. According to Neumann, aesthetes “roam about Czech literature with their pathetic, impoverished vocabulary of beautiful words, so pretentious but, alas, so insipid.” The aesthete, he said, was a “hypochondriac and mean person”; he was “all mood and no character.” Simply put, “he negates life.” As an antidote to aestheticist nihilism, Neumann prescribed the embrace of “life itself.” “Long live life!” he proclaimed. “The devotees of modern art are the devotees of life.”Footnote 29
For Neumann, “life” above all meant everyday life. “In contrast to the preceding art which in general was brittle, decadent, turned away from simple and natural reality,” he wrote, “we want an art that is strong and vigorous, which is and always was the celebration of its age in its most humble forms.” The humble forms of modern life that Neumann most often chose to highlight were its new technological realities. His affirmation of contemporary life entailed above all “a deepening of feeling for the possibilities of civilization and technical culture.”Footnote 30 “Our new poems,” he wrote, “will be called The Oceanliner, The Monoplane, The Aqueduct, The Tunnel, and The Viaduct….We are totally satisfied if readers hear in our poems the rhythm of box cars, the hum of crankshafts, and the rattle of cogwheels.”Footnote 31 In another essay he made the internal/external, female/male dichotomy plainer still: “From over-powdered boudoirs we have been forced outside into the fresh air.”Footnote 32 The prewar generation, in other words, forsook the claustrophobic interior space of feminine artifice for the bracing world of male external reality.
In one of his best-known essays of the period, “Open Windows,” Neumann compiled a lengthy list of people, places, and things to which he wished “Death To!” as the enemies of modernism. It included, of course, many Czech decadents and aesthetes, but as if to make the gendered character of the prewar modernist movement perfectly clear, he ended his list with the words: “Death to: femininity, fancy accessories, women's needlework!” This was followed by a list of items receiving Neumann's approbation, prefaced by the words “Long Live!” It included most of the artistic styles associated with pre-World War I modernism (fauvism, expressionism, cubism, orphism, paroxysm, etc.), the names of their Czech advocates and practitioners, as well as a somewhat incongruous collection of items that Neumann grouped together mainly because they were for him manifestations of material, technological, and cultural modernity. Most of these would have been clearly understood as “male.” The list reads:
Long live:
machinism, sports fields, Frištenský [a Czech boxer], the Českomoravská Machine-Tool Works, the Central Slaughterhouse, Laurin and Klement [a Czech car and motorcycle manufacturer], the crematorium, the cinema of the future, the Circus Henry, the military concert on Střelecký Island and in Stromovka Park, the World's Fair, railroad stations, artistic advertising, steel, and concrete!Footnote 33
Neumann's essay was likely inspired by Apollinaire's manifesto “L'Antitradition Futuriste” (1913), published just a month earlier, but it also owes a clear debt to the writings of Marinetti, who Neumann greatly admired. It was not without some justification that critics labeled Neumann “the Czech Futurist.”Footnote 34 Like the Futurists, the Czech prewar modernists unquestionably associated maleness with technology and modern material culture, as well as with physical prowess and violence, but the similarities are in fact more limited than these likenesses suggest. As will be shown below, the Czechs rejected key attributes of Italian Futurism, giving their conception of modernist masculinity a substantially different character.
In the years before World War I, Neumann was very close to Karel Čapek and to his brother Josef, who was also one of the best-known Czech cubist painters. In a 1913 letter to Neumann, Josef Čapek left no doubt about the masculine qualities of his friend's work or about his admiration for such art: “I just read your poem ‘Circus’ once again…For me, it represents the most masculine thing in the entire Almanach…The kind of art I like most is that which is very masculine; generally speaking, those poets who are held in high regard in Bohemia today are not very masculine at all, as if all their strong feelings were transformed into a lofty and sexless poetic metaphysics, which is very boring.”Footnote 35
To briefly illustrate what Josef Čapek had in mind, the first two lines of Neumann's poem “Circus” read: “I love its posters / Which explode like hand grenades.”Footnote 36 This is a direct and therefore wholly unpoetic translation, but it is an accurate rendering of the poem's meaning that neatly captures the prewar modernist association of masculinity with explosive violence.
Like Neumann, Karel Čapek assailed aestheticism and decadence for their introversion and subjectivism and explained how his generation strove for their transcendence. “There needlessly persists the opinion,” he wrote, “that individual feelings, passions, and agonies, that the inner life of the unique individual is more profound, more beautiful, and more human than mass movements, than ideas that have some concrete effect, than work, than the life that is going on before our very eyes.”Footnote 37 Elsewhere, Čapek maintained that the spirit of modern art “is not egocentric, it is not concerned only with the self, but rather turns out toward the realities of the world in order to know them and to transform them.”Footnote 38 One of the central aims, then, of the Czech prewar modernist movement was to reorient art away from inner, subjective experience, which its members understood as feminine, to the material, social, and technological realities of the external world, which they defined as masculine.
Unmanly Art: The Secession
While the focus thus far has been on the ways Czech modernists associated aestheticism and decadence with inwardness, passivity, moodiness, and artifice, they used almost exactly the same terms to describe other movements of turn-of-the-century modernism, above all perhaps the Secession, which they treated primarily as a movement in architecture.Footnote 39 Attitudes toward the Secession were mixed in that the Czechs valued it greatly for effecting a decisive break with the prevailing historicist architecture of the nineteenth century and for its determination to build in a style appropriate to the age. In this sense, it represented the first genuinely modern form of architecture. On the other hand, they believed that the Secession had badly failed at its core mission and had descended into mere ornamentation.
According to Pavel Janák (1882–1956), one of the pioneers of Czech cubist architecture, the Secession had succumbed to the “disease of mood” that had afflicted so much of fin-de-siècle artistic production. For him, “moody” art was art that was obsessed with inner, psychological struggles and the feelings that produced them. Its fatal flaw was that it was fundamentally passive, existing only in relation to the temporary conditions that caused the mood. He condemned impressionism, for example, as a form of “mood painting” because of its dependence on shifting external conditions, especially changes in light and the weather. Yet his real target was the Secession. With its emphasis on feelings and inner, psychic states, the Secession had totally subordinated itself to the external circumstances that elicited such inner responses. The Secession was therefore doomed to be a passive, inward-looking art, far removed from a genuinely new style appropriate to the conditions of modern life. Its novel use of organic forms to adorn the facades of buildings was mere ornament.Footnote 40
The only figure of the Secession universally admired by the Czech cubist architects was Otto Wagner (1841–1918), some of whom studied with him in Vienna.Footnote 41 But they liked Wagner mainly for his assault on historicism and for his later functionalism, which ran counter to the moodiness and decorativity of the Secession's more organic forms. It almost goes without saying that they saw Wagner's architecture as masculine. Janák, who was one of Wagner's students, described his mentor's work as a “natural, manly expression of the ideals of the age directed against all the weaknesses and afflictions of the creative spirit, against sentimentality, gaiety, adornment, intimacy, and moodiness, none of which has anything to do with the healthy, strong character of modern man.”Footnote 42
But it was the architect Josef Chochol (1880–1956) who was most explicit about the Secession's femininity and of the masculine nature of the Czech rebellion against it. In reference to the Secession's penchant for intricate, decorative facades, Chochol wrote: “This ornamentation is intrinsic to effeminate and stylized natures, but it is inappropriate to the masculine character of our times.” The modern age, he maintained, “loves an ostensibly vulgar coarseness” and prefers the “forceful simplicity of internally concentrated matter” to “external blandishments and superficial ‘charm.’” And further:
We want to substitute ornamentation with the elemental nature of form shaped by the intellect. And just as we repudiate décor and ornament, we strive no less to attain by force a concentrated and comprehensive effect, whose signature will be the desire for exactness of a mathematical sort, for a rough austerity, for an invigorating barb. This we prefer to the stiffness of the perfumed and sterile dandyisms and perversities of the past as well as to petty-bourgeois naïve geniality.Footnote 43
In these remarkable passages, Chochol makes clear his view that the surface embellishment characteristic of Secession architecture was a marker of its femininity, if not homosexuality. More importantly, such architecture represented a fundamental misapprehension of modern life, which he believed to be inherently masculine. The Secession's effeminacy was therefore a symptom of its disharmony with the age. Architecture in harmony with the age was male and, presumably, heterosexual. It was strong, vigorous, exacting, austere, simple, forceful, internally concentrated, intellectual, slightly coarse, and barb-like (phallic?). Its forms originated not in moods and passive feelings, but in the exertions of the mind as it strove to give shape and order to the world. These, according to Chochol, were the characteristics of the then emerging cubist architecture.
Prague versus Vienna: The Outward Turn
All of the above raises the following questions: Why did the styles of turn-of-the-century modernism—the Secession, decadence, aestheticism—which unquestionably ruled the day in Vienna and in Prague, have so little appeal to the young artists of the Czech prewar modernist movement? Why did they position themselves so clearly against them? Why were they so determined to effect an outward reorientation of this art's inwardness? It is instructive here to revisit Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. In his book, Schorske famously argued that Viennese culture at the turn of the twentieth century was marked by a pronounced retreat from public and social life and a corresponding withdrawal into private worlds of the self. He attributed this inward turn to the disintegration of Austria's liberal-aristocratic political order in the face of challenges from nationalist and anti-Semitic political movements. When this order came to crisis in the 1890s, there was no place for Vienna's mainly Jewish cultural elite to turn for integrative, communal values since they were by definition excluded from the new nationally conceived community. There was thus a pronounced turn inward among liberal intellectuals, culminating in narcissism and disillusionment. Schorske makes very clear that the art reflective of this inwardness was overwhelmingly associated with femininity.Footnote 44
In proposing this thesis, Schorske may have been guilty of overstating the pervasiveness of the inward turn, since important figures of Viennese culture, such as the writers Karl Kraus or Robert Musil, do not fit comfortably into his scheme. His conclusions about its depoliticizing effect have also proven difficult to sustain. If Schorske's thesis has been challenged thoroughly over the years on these and other grounds,Footnote 45 then it still provides an exceptionally fruitful means of thinking about cultural life in Vienna and elsewhere in Austria-Hungary and for this reason remains a touchstone for most studies of the subject, even among scholars who contest his findings. With some modifications, it can be applied to Budapest and especially to the Prague of Franz Kafka, that is, to German-Jewish Prague.Footnote 46 But it does not apply well at all to the Czech-identified artists of Prague for a simple reason: They were not alienated from their public and social life.Footnote 47
Artists like Neumann or Čapek, Kodíček or Chochol, may have felt dismay at the provincialism and conservatism of Czech life, and looked, for example, to French or Italian culture for inspiration, but few questioned their own sense of national belonging.Footnote 48 They shared none of the doubts about their place in society that dogged so many of their colleagues in Vienna and Budapest. There is no indication that they suffered from the crises of identity endemic to Vienna during the years of the empire's decline.Footnote 49 They shared none of the gloom or sense of foreboding about the empire's possible demise, nor, however, did they predict or expect its collapse. There was no rash of suicides in Prague as there was elsewhere in the empire.Footnote 50 They were not obsessed with sickness, degeneration, or the need for rejuvenation. To the extent that there had been a decadent movement in Czech literature, they repudiated it resoundingly. Unlike so many of their contemporaries, they looked forward to the future with optimism and hope. They felt themselves part of a young and vigorous nation whose wealth and status was only improving. Looking ahead, they felt the future was theirs.
Arguably, the Czechs were the most successful nation-builders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While in its last tumultuous decades they were frequently the instigators of the empire's crises, they were just as likely to gain from them politically. Czechs were likewise among the principal beneficiaries of Austrian industrialization. Centered in Bohemia and Moravia, the industrial expansion of the second half of the nineteenth century fueled an economic boom that relieved rural unemployment and in large measure created the Czech middle class. A full three-fifths of Austrian industry was concentrated in the Bohemian Crownlands.Footnote 51 Accompanying the economic boom was rapid urban growth and an impressive broadening of literacy and educational opportunities. By the last decade of the century, Czech schools, the vehicles of choice for the inculcation of national consciousness, had achieved full parity with German institutions at all levels of instruction.Footnote 52 The Czech-speaking population was increasing rapidly as well—to the political detriment of the Bohemian Germans. As it expanded, the Austrian state grudgingly but consistently acknowledged the validity of Czech cultural and political claims, granting ever more rights and privileges.
In this context of social mobility, prosperity, educational opportunity, and increasing political power, the artists of the prewar modernist generation did not, as so many of their predecessors had done, conceive of the nation defensively, in terms of an idealized communal past or bastion against an encompassing Germandom, but optimistically, as an expression of the integrative possibilities of the future. They rejected all attempts to define the nation exclusively on the basis of past ways of life and traditions and acknowledged no contradiction between modern life and national life or between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. Conservative critics assailed the prewar modernists as “non-national” and “cosmopolitan,” but they conceived their project in national terms, as the advancement and enrichment of Czech culture, and they vigorously contested their critics’ charges.
They argued that real national art was not to be found in historical painting, romantic literature, or folk culture, but only in art that attended to the conditions of contemporary Czech life. It was art that paid heed to the transformations wrought by science and industry, that was open to new ideas and styles, and that participated in the latest European developments. In other words, real national art was modern art, and to be Czech was to embrace the present, not to retreat into the protective cocoon of the past.Footnote 53 Turning the tables on the prewar generation's critics, Neumann implied that those who did not like or did not support modern art were the ones who were unpatriotic. He asked: “And why wouldn't you join hands with our [cubist] painters? Why wouldn't you want modern art everywhere and always? And why wouldn't you want something even more than art: a strong, modern nation?”Footnote 54
Absolutely confident in their “Czechness,” the artists of the prewar modernist generation felt no need to flee their external environment into the protective shelter of the self. Their attempt to overcome the subjectivism of fin-de-siècle art was a bid to get out of the (female) garden of the self and to forge a relationship of sustenance with the (male) external world on the basis of uncompromisingly modern values. The self-proclaimed masculinity of their art was an expression of their sense of ease in the external world and of their desire to embrace and affirm modern life.
Cubism's Sex
That cubism was at the center of this project is incontestable. Why it should have been is another question for, in the popular imagination, cubism is often understood as the quintessential art of modern anxiety and uncertainty. It is associated with the breakdown in modern times of traditional systems of value and artistic norms. Its distortion of space and form is said to reflect the instability and insecurity of modern life. Its defiance of naturalistic representation and of the centuries-old formal conventions governing pictorial space is viewed as the triumph of artistic willfulness over commonsense notions of reality. As a consequence, cubism often has been decried as an art of extreme subjectivism, as the victory of the artist's private vision over everyday optical appearance and conventional formal systems, furthering the breakdown of communication between artist and audience and contributing to the ever-increasing alienation in modern times of art from everyday life. In short, cubism is said to reflect modern anxiety and instability and to extend and expand, rather than limit, artistic subjectivity.Footnote 55
There is in fact little evidence to support such an interpretation of the style, and this is certainly not how the young artists of the prewar modernist generation understood it. To them, cubism was just the opposite: an art of confidence and optimism in the modern world. In their view, their culture was not in the process of dissolution; it was cohering around new forms. They perceived the modern world not as hopelessly fragmented by a proliferation of conflicting values, not as unstable and anxiety-inducing, but as tending toward a new unity. As one of the most outspoken young artists, the painter Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918), bluntly declared: “It is a lie and a simple falsehood for anyone to claim that the modern age is fragmented and disunified, that it does not have a firm spiritual foundation, that it is unstable and volatile, and that modern man does not have solid ground on which to base his worldview.”Footnote 56 While the “firm spiritual foundation” of modern life might be difficult to grasp or to define, they were convinced of its reality. Seizing hold of it and giving it communicable form was for them the goal of modern art.
The Czechs acknowledged that the art of some of their fellow modernists was formless and incoherent, the merely unstructured outpouring of subjective experience, but that was not their aim. To them, cubism was not the apotheosis of fin-de-siècle subjectivism but a way out of it; it involved the renewal of form, not its destruction. Any new formal system, to be sure, could only arise from the artist's imagination, but that did not mean it was arbitrary or incoherent. Due to its unfamiliarity, a new formal system might be disorienting, but its aim was order, harmony, and ultimately communication. Cubism was not just personal expression, it was an attempt to organize expression in a new way. It was not withdrawal from the world into the shelter of a private, subjective space, but a form of engagement with the world that acknowledged the subjective constitution of its order. The formal order of cubist painting originated in subjective experience but also transcended the individual, capturing, so they believed, something essential about modern life.
Cubism's orientation to modern life and its formalism were the key elements of its “maleness.” The attempt to grapple with modern life and give it coherent form was a self-conscious, strenuous, intellectual process that was, as Josef Chochol suggested, decidedly masculine. The maleness of cubism's formalism is perhaps best understood in contradistinction to the concurrent expressionist “explosion in the garden” undertaken by the Viennese and Germans. Whereas the expressionist revolt was still confined to the garden, that is, inside the walls of the self, and in this sense was primarily a rawer perpetuation of the (feminine) psychological probing of Klimt and the Secession,Footnote 57 cubism was an attempt to get out of the garden of the self and to reestablish a relationship of sustenance with the external world. It was an attempt to give form to the experience of modern life and not merely to express one's feelings about it.
Of the art of their modernist contemporaries, Karel and Josef Čapek were by far the most critical of expressionism, which, they felt, perpetuated many of the problems of fin-de-siècle artistic movements. In a review of Vassily Kandinsky's now famous manifesto On the Spiritual in Art (1911), Josef Čapek faulted expressionist painting for its extreme subjectivism, noting its continuity with the art of the Secession. “Strongly influenced by the mood of the Secession,” the young Polish and German expressionists, he wrote, “do not respond seriously and convincingly to their stated demand for inner necessity and musical composition. These paintings, whether they are called Impressions, Improvisations, or Compositions, are so personal and subjective that it is impossible to derive from them the least real method or rule to facilitate their comprehension.”Footnote 58 Cubist art, in contrast, was difficult but not incomprehensible or incoherent because it possessed a formal order. Because its formal order was new and unfamiliar, it was disorienting, but it was not meant to be a purely private vision. The aim of cubism was communication across personal boundaries, not simply subjective expression.
In another article, Josef Čapek outlined his reservations about expressionism in more precise terms. In modern art, he said:
the artist is faced with the task not only of expressing himself…but of expressing himself in a particular way; artistic expression should not be mainly some kind of prolapse of the artist's emotions…. The artist has an equal formal task as well an expressive one. Expressionism (for example, Matisse's) was, from today's perspective, merely an expression of the artist's inner self.Footnote 59
Although here Josef Čapek singled out Matisse for his subjectivism, it was the German expressionists whom he reproached most often. In a 1914 review of an exhibition of modern art in Berlin, he compared the “shrill” work of the Germans to the “calm,” “formal” art of the French cubists, leaving no doubt that he preferred the manly quiet and self-control of the French to the hysterical anguish of the Germans.Footnote 60
To Karel Čapek, the problems of German expressionist painting were reproduced in expressionist poetry. In his estimation, the Germans were engaged in a project markedly different from that of the young generation of French (and, indeed, Czech) artists and writers:Footnote 61
The newest German poetry differs dramatically from the modern poetry of, say, the French; the difference here is no less great than that between the intelligent formal art of the young French painters and the brutal expressionism of Die Brücke or Der Sturm. The Germans’ modernism is made as if in a moment of crisis, in a state of agitation, without order; more often than not, their works speak of pain, oppression, and fever; these are all symptoms of a generation with more temperament than formal creativity.Footnote 62
Čapek's objections to expressionist poetry were twofold. First, even though he commended the German writers’ turn toward the things of this world and engagement with pressing social issues (which he considered expressionism's strongest point), he detected in them a profound unease with modern life. “They are as if tormented by reality,” he maintained.Footnote 63 Faced with the onslaught of new sensations and experiences, their response was anxiety, pain, and irony. Implicitly, the Czechs, like the French, were more at home in the modern world, that is, they were more “male.”
But the most serious deficiency of the new German poetry was that it lacked form. Expressionist poetry was “anarchic, chaotic, raw and agonized”; it was limited to “the intensive immediacy of expression”; it lacked “construction, intellectual labor, and the search for beauty in modern things.”Footnote 64 For Čapek, the key to modern art was “formal creativity.” The true modern artist seized hold of the raw material of the senses, shaped it according to an idea, and transformed it into something new. It was an active, constructive, intellectual process, a decidedly “male” process very different from the chaotic “female” outpouring of feelings and sensations he associated with the expressionists.
Modernity as Penetration
The masculine nature of the Czech modernist project and of cubism's place within it becomes even clearer if we consider one of the central metaphors used by the artists of the prewar generation to describe modernity itself: they imagined it as the experience or process of “penetration.” Josef Čapek, for example, claimed that that which is modern seeks to “penetrate and to master matter.”Footnote 65 Karel Čapek suggested that no other age possessed such a “thirst to merge into and penetrate the wide flow of the world as this new modern age.”Footnote 66 The architect Vlastislav Hofman similarly maintained that “all of modern life is suffused with the desire for the unknown and the will to penetrate it.”Footnote 67 But no member of the prewar modernist movement was more explicit about “penetrative” character of the modern than the painter Bohumil Kubišta. In his words: “I don't know if I should dare to try to name that immaterial, invisible, subtle core of all that is modern, but I suppose I won't be making a very grave mistake if I call it penetration.” To Kubišta, “penetration” was the universal principle of the modern age: “Just as every member of modern society is driven by this idea, so too is the modern artist. Penetrate further is his slogan, penetrate there where no one else has been, create that which no one else has created….” As if to complete the phallic image suggested by this language, he described the modern age as “stripped bare of all embellishments, naked and hard.”Footnote 68
The erotic connotations of Kubišta's ideas can hardly be overlooked, but he had more in mind than sexual discovery (though he may have been thinking of that too). What Kubišta meant by “penetration” was the modern tendency, derived in large part from science, to reclaim control over human affairs that had once been ceded to some external power, such as nature or God. It was the liberating sense that all forms of life and culture were neither eternal nor natural, but rather were human constructions. “Penetration” was the recognition that human beings themselves were the authors of the rules, boundaries, and values that circumscribed their activity. It was the way in which, through their activity in the world, through their “penetration” of it, human beings had created the forms of life that enabled their own existence within it.
And this is exactly what modern art in general and cubism in particular revealed to such astonishing effect. For the Czechs, cubism's essence was the emancipation of art from nature. It revealed once and for all that there was nothing natural about naturalism, that all formal systems of artistic representation were conventions and constructions, that is, human impositions of form on life. In the words of Karel Čapek: “It is precisely naturalism that gives people the…most common objection to cubism: that it is simply a crime against nature, which is the wellspring of all beauty; that it geometrizes nature, chops it up, violates it; that it forsakes all reality, truth and natural relations, and that it represents the greatest of abominations.” But, he countered, “All art departs from nature and not even naturalism is a natural form of perception.” Naturalism offered nothing more than a sophisticated illusion of reality. The complex rules of illusionism, perfected over the course of centuries, exposed the truth about naturalism: There was nothing natural about it. “Even naturalism means seeing the world in a given perspective, within given conventions, which are no more ‘natural’ than a consistent idealization and stylization,” he explained.Footnote 69 Cubism was indeed a direct assault on naturalism, but it was not simply a nihilistic attempt to violate nature or bring down centuries of artistic tradition. Rather, it demonstrated the simple truth that artistic representation was conventional as such, that it was never “natural,” that it was always the product of human invention and imagination.
The genius of modern art was that it made this truth explicit. It replaced one set of artistic conventions grounded, wrongly, in “natural” relations, with a new one that freely acknowledged its conventional character, its self-conscious construction. The essential quality of modern art was that it was not derived from nature, but was “artificial,” that is, man-made. Modern art, wrote Vlastislav Hofman, “replaces nature with artificiality, with an autonomous human order, with the complete authority of artificial form, such that form, a creation of the mind, replaces natural objects.”Footnote 70 Josef Čapek sounded the same note: “Autonomy or artificiality of the modern form is the primary demand of the new endeavor…. It arises through consistency, experimentation, and the conscious ‘cultivation’ of form; above the chaos of nature and the raw dynamism of inner feelings, the artist erects something more absolute and intellectual: the artificiality of form.”Footnote 71
It was this form-giving activity above all else that they conceived in male terms, and it was hard and even brutal work. “A new style is not born in sweetness and effeminacy,” insisted Karel Čapek. The artist had “to seize hold of reality,” “to grasp it body to body,” “to master it,” “to overcome it.”Footnote 72 There was an unmistakable element of violence to this process; the military metaphors that have arisen are not incidental. Hofman, for one, compared the feeling for modern art to that of a soldier for his machine gun.Footnote 73 Karel Čapek put it explicitly when he wrote: “We ought to be disgusted by sweetness and moderation and by beauty which is not won from raw reality as it were by violence.”Footnote 74 The modernist artist had to wrest form from the raw material of nature by forcibly imposing his will upon it; through his “penetration” of it, he gave the world new shape and form. Cubism perfectly embodied this synthesis of manly violence and formal creativity.
Form and Futurism
The emphasis on the violence of the modernist creative process seems to align the Czechs with the bellicose masculinity of the Italian Futurists and might suggest common political trajectories. But the differences between the two groups and their notions of masculinity are in fact very great. For one, the Czechs rejected out of hand the aggressive politics of the Futurists. “They are irredentists; they rave about the industrial, military, and colonial expansion of Italy,” wrote Josef Čapek disapprovingly.Footnote 75 Their militant nationalism, stated Karel Čapek, “is ethically alien to us.”Footnote 76 To be sure, the Czechs imagined their modernism in national terms, too, as the promotion of Czech culture, but they were always at loggerheads with the radical nationalists of their own society, those who condemned their work for its openness to French, Italian, and German innovations. The Czechs may have drawn lines between their modernism and that of other national groups in Austria-Hungary, asserting that they were more at home in the modern world and therefore more “masculine” than others, namely Germans, but belligerent nationalism was never an element of their notion of masculinity in the way it was for the Futurists. It was not “manly” to be a chauvinist. Similarly, whereas the Czech modernists, with a handful of exceptions, overwhelmingly opposed World War I, the Futurists clamored for Italian participation as a means of rejuvenating (and re-masculinizing) Italian society. Finally and perhaps most tellingly, in the postwar years, none of the Czech modernists was drawn to Fascism. The Futurists, of course, were among Mussolini's earliest and most vociferous supporters. If both the Czechs and the Italians embraced manly violence, for the Czechs it was always aesthetic rather than political.
At the root of these differing conceptions of masculinity is the issue of form. For the Czech modernists, the violent assault on stale conventions and traditions was balanced by the patient, methodical, intellectual process of form-creation. Czech modernist masculinity involved not just the destruction of old conventions, but also the “cultivation of form,” the imposition of new form on life. And this is precisely where the Futurists, at least according to the Czechs, fell short. The Czech modernists viewed Futurist painting unfavorably in comparison to cubism and argued that one of its chief failings was its lack of form.
The Futurists had “no concern for or interest in form,” remarked the Czech cubist painter Emil Filla (1882–1953) in a scathing review of an exhibition of Futurist painting at the Berlin gallery Der Sturm. “Lacking any kind of internal logic,” he went on to say, “they mask their banal Secessionist painting in the formal techniques of neo-impressionism, Picasso, and Braque, but without really understanding them.”Footnote 77 Filla and others argued that Futurism, despite its apparent similarities with cubism, was in fact more akin to impressionism or to Secessionist art due to its passive apprehension of reality. In the Futurist “style of motion,” the artist was simply a passive recorder of a succession of optical sensations, not an active participant in the construction of reality. The Futurist attempt to represent reality's dynamism through the use of sequential images only confirmed that Futurist painting was a heightened form of impressionism.Footnote 78 Filla concluded that Futurism was “nothing other than mere moody impressionist painting moved over from the objective vibration of the optical impression (of light and color) to the moody subjective representation of rhythmic line.”Footnote 79
Karel Čapek was a much more sympathetic observer of Futurism than Filla, but he too described it as a “blend of impressionism, the Secession, and symbolism” and viewed it as an “even more brutal form of phenomenalism” than impressionism.Footnote 80 For him, too, one of the key differences between Futurism and cubism and the reason for the latter's superiority was form. According to Čapek: “To move from impressions to more durable notions means to process impressions in the workshop of the soul, that is, to transform them, to discipline them, to give them stability, form, and, in short, ideality. This is the foundation of cubist theory, incomparably more excellent than the doctrine of the Italian Futurists.”Footnote 81
By highlighting Futurism's lack of form, by describing it in terms of moodiness and passivity, and by comparing it to impressionism, symbolism, and especially the Secession, that most “feminine” of artistic styles, the Czechs were in effect questioning its manliness.
Conclusion: Real Men Make Form
The larger issue, however, is simply that the Czech modernists possessed a different notion of masculinity than the Futurists. They shared with them the desire to overcome the withdrawn “feminine” aestheticism of the fin de siècle and understood as “masculine” art that reflected and affirmed modern life. They both also emphasized the maleness of the transgressive violence of modernism, its shattering of ossified and inherited artistic conventions. But for the Czechs another critical element of masculinity was the laborious process of giving new form to life, of creating new means to capture and transmit the values and experiences of the age. And these forms had to be coherent and comprehensible to others; the goal was communication across personal boundaries, not self-expression or provocation. The “cultivation of form” was a patient, methodical, intellectual process that could not be accomplished by strength, will, or instinct alone. If the Futurist conception of masculinity merged almost seamlessly with the Fascist ideal,Footnote 82 it was because both put action, violence, devotion to the nation, and the denigration of reason at its core. The Czech modernist conception departed from both in the communicative and intellectual dimensions of its formalism. Despite its emphasis on transgressive violence, Czech modernist masculinity thus shares only passing similarities with Fascist manifestations and perhaps helps explain why the Czech modernists did not, like the Futurists, find in Fascism an appropriate partner for their goal of revitalizing and re-masculinizing their culture.
Still, in the years before World War I, there can be no question that Czech modernist artists conceived their project in aggressively masculinist terms. Secure in their “Czechness,” they rebelled against the inwardness of fin-de-siècle art and sought to reforge a relationship of sustenance with the external, contemporary world. Persuaded that a central feature of modern life was its “penetration” by human activity, they sought to reveal the conventional character or “artificiality” of all its forms and thereby to make possible the invention of new forms better suited to modern needs. It was this rough and sometimes violent but also intellectual and methodical work that was imagined as male and cubism that embodied it most completely. To return to the words of Josef Kodíček cited at the beginning of this essay, it was this kind of work that made masculinity the most striking feature of the group of people who performed it. It was what in Kodíček's mind made his peers “real men.”
