The City Gallery Prague is Staging a Retrospective of Václav Radimský

Written by Caroline Woodbridge Wednesday, 21 March 2012 21:48

Prague.- Earlier this year, sixty-five years had elapsed since the death of the landscapist Václav Radimský, and in the year 2012, one hundred and forty-five years will have passed from his birth. To mark these two anniversaries, City Gallery Prague is staging a major retrospective of his work in the galleries of the Municipal Library, and Arbor vitae is publishing Radimský´s first comprehensive monograph. "Vaclav Radimsky (1867 - 1946)" is on view through February 5th 2012. The present exhibition brings together around two hundred paintings, with a special place being assigned to the triptych "View of Kolín", a grandiose work of three by eight-and-a-half metres. Here, it also marks a watershed between the section featuring pictures created in France, and the part showing works painted by Radimský after his return to Bohemia.

Václav Radimský was a member of the first generation of Czech Impressionist. Unlike most of his peers who embraced the Impressionist style, however, he was not a pupil of Julius Marák. Rather, he studied at Eduard von Lichtenfels´ private school of landscape painting in Vienna, which he followed up by a brief stint with Eduard Schleich in Munich, before setting out for Paris in 1888. At the behest of the painter Zdenka Braunerová he moved to Barbizon, probably in 1891, where he made a first-hand acquaintance with French Impressionist painting, and in particular with the output of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro which he took as his model. Monet, by then a celebrated artist, lived in Giverny, surrounded by a large colony of painters who had gathered there from around the globe. From 1895 they were joined by a Czech artist with an Austrian passport: Václav Radimský. Like the majority of artists based in Giverny, Radimský was initially lodged at the hotel Baudy, then took a house in town, and eventually settled in a disused flour-mill which he purchased in the village of Le Goulet. He set up his studio there, and also used a dinghy at anchor on the Seine as a floating studio, and in which he would reportedly be occasionally joined by Monet. It was there that Radimský did an extensive series of views of the Seine in different seasons of the year.


His favourite themes, however, were sunlit parts, views of the water surface, and reflections of trees in water, in all of which he focused on the rendition of flickering light, sunbeams, and the palette capturing a day´s atmosphere. Radimský built up a successful career in France. He exhibited his work at the Paris salons, in 1894 becoming the youngest artist ever to win an award, for the painting "Etudes de Fougères". In the following year, he received a medal in Rouen, and in 1900 another one, at the World Exhibition in Paris. At the same time, he maintained regular contacts with his native country, sending his works to exhibitions mounted by the Czech Fine Arts Association. His series of eighty-eight paintings on view at Prague´s Topi gallery in 1899 offered to the Czech public the first taste of the Impressionist style, and reproductions of his paintings were regularly published in the pages of the magazines Zlatá Praha, Svetozor, and Volné smery.

In Paris, Radimský married Louise Fromont, a native of Vernon, and he would likely have settled in France for the rest of his life, were it not for the First World War. Officially blacklisted as “hostile alien,” he was at first jailed then interned, to be released only at the intercession of Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau who had previously purchased a painting by Radimský. Disillusioned by France, Radimský returned to his native country after the war, and settled in his birthplace, at the estate of Pašinka near Kolín, central Bohemia, which was then owned by his half-brothers. He went on living and working there until his death in 1946. When Radimský returned to Bohemia after the end of the First World War, Czech painting, including that produced by members of his own generation, was already on its way towards a new, different expression. Radimský remained alone in his continued adherence to the Impressionist tradition. His painting, ever permeated with light in keeping with its French model, and content-wise focused predominantly on the nature of the central part of the Elbe Valley, began to draw increasingly critical response. Radimský was a diligent artist, he worked hard, one exhibition following the next in close succession; all of them were selling shows, which accounts for the fact that the larger part of his output is today in private hands. Václav Radimský died of pneumonia in a hospital in Kolín, in 1946, aged seventy-nine. He and his wife, Louise, are buried in the family grave near the church in Kbel near Kolín.


The first impulse to establish the Prague city picture gallery arose from the pictorial department of the newly established Art Forum headed by Josef Mánes in the eitheen sixties. The main intention was public benefit as well as support of contemporary artists. The city council then began to buy their works even though only occasionally. The municipal collection proliferated gradually also thanks to gifts from individuals as well as institutions. A grand set of Jaroslav Cermák´s paintings from Hippolyta Gallait and a set of work of Václav Brožík from the knight Václav Špacek of Starburg enriched the collection on the turn of the 19th and 20th century. The idea of a city gallery in the capitol came to the forefront again after the constitution of the independent Czechoslovak Republic. At the end of the twenties in the newly built Municipal Library exhibition halls were assigned to the gallery. At around the same time, in 1928, the city of Prague obtained a generous gift from Alfons Mucha: the cycle of monumental canvases "The Slav Epic". The city council ensured a better systematic nature of the purchases for the intended gallery by establishing administrative procedures and in 1927 the sculptor Ladisla Šaloun became a permanent artistic consultant. Up until the beginning of World War II the gallery acquired many important and now classic works of the 20th century modern art, msotly by purhcasing works from exhibitions it hosted, including; E. Filla, R. Kremlicka, O. Kubín, J. Bauch, F. Muzika, J. Šíma, V. Špála, J. Štyrský, J. Zrzavý, carvings of O. Gutfreund, J. Wagner and others. After the war the plans to establish a city gallery gained intensity again in the second half of the fifties and the National Committee of Prague has been pointedly buying the works of contemporary artistic displays. Many years of effort and endeavor were fulfilled on May 1, 1963 when the City Gallery Prague was founded. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.citygalleryprague.cz

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~