Prague Journal

Friday, September 17, 2004.

For our last morning together, the Fulbright group visited the Museum of Czech Cubism at the House at the Black Madonna, a five-story building with jetty windows that originally housed retail and utility spaces and a café on the first floor that was furnished with cubist furniture. The building is named after the stone sculpture of a black Madonna sitting on top of it, and is one of the world’s rarest examples of Cubist architecture. The trademarks of the Czech Cubists, a unique, avant-garde group active in Prague between 1910 and 1914, are sharp points, slicing planes, and crystalline shapes that can be seen in paintings, sculpture, building facades, furniture, and decorative objects. According to art historian Miroslav Lamac "Prague became the city of cubism with cubist apartment blocks full of cubist flats furnished with cubist furniture. The inhabitants could drink coffee from cubist cups, put flowers in cubist vases, keep the time on cubist clocks, light their rooms with cubist lamps and read books in cubist type." The Czech Cubists believed that an object's true internal energy could only be released by breaking up the vertical and horizontal surfaces that restrain and repress it in conventional design. By incorporating angled planes into the design of everyday objects, they tried to give them a dynamism that turned them into works of art in their own right. For them, the pyramid was the pinnacle of architectural design and the crystal the ideal natural form. I was particularly moved by the sculpture of Otto Gutfreund, a German/Czech Jew from northeast Bohemia.
The morning concluded with a short visit to the Fulbright office, where the staff is gearing up for the next round of applications. After lunch, I strolled down Wenceslas Square where, amid the bustling stores and kiosks, one is taken with sculpture from the International Exhibit of Modern Art and the cow parade (cows appear to be ubiquitous in Prague these days, from parks and street corners to the top of some metro stops).
Evening services at Spanish Synagogue seemed to have more of the regular Bejt Praha attendees. After the service we had Kiddush with bread and honey. We went with Harriet and Marty Ottenheimer, linguistic anthropologists and ethnographers (he is here this fall on a Fulbright grant; she had a similar grant three years ago) to a modest (and delicious) Afghani restaurant. Beer led the dinner; dinner begged dessert; good conversation (four academics!) led to a rather late night!

posted by JWinn @ 8:34 PM