Czech Vision

"Untitled (Death Wake)," by Vaclav Zykmund, 1944.


“Czech Vision” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhattan, writes Roberta Smith, "pursues one of the many leads tossed out by 'Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945,' the revelatory overview of interwar photography on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The photographers working in Czechoslovakia are especially tantalizing at the museum. At Greenberg, with 63 early prints by 21 of them, they seem to form a nearly complete microcosm of modernity."


"Composition," by Jaromir Funke, 1927


The gallery show expands on the achievement of figures like the great Jaromir Funke, as well as Jaroslav Rossler, Frantisek Drtikol and Vaclav Zykmund.


"Eugen Wiskovsky," by Jaromir Funke, 1929.


"Funke, represented in the show by 13 images, was active as a teacher, theorist and serial founder of photo clubs that kept ousting him. The photographs here concentrate on his wonderfully dematerialized set-up images of objects and their shadows but also include images of church vaults and a straightforward yet psychologically intense form of portraiture."


Funke's “Portrait of a Woman With a Bob” (around 1930) is striking, Roberta Smith writes, "not just for capturing its subject's intelligence, but also for its imposing size (19 by 14 inches), which brings to mind Andy Warhol's portraits."

"Untitled (advertisement)," by Josef Sudek, c.1932-36.


The show reveals once more the seamlessness between the Bauhaus-inflected vanguard and the era’s commercial work, visible especially in the starkly ordered images of china, flatware, biscuits and plumbing pipes by Vera Gabrielova, Jan Lauschmann and Alexander Hackenschmied. It also elucidates the weaving of soulfulness and formal clarity at which Czech artists excelled.

December 9, 2007