Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde

Frantisek Dritkol, Nude with Vase, 1927

On the topic of Czech photography, the Phillips is running a great show on Czech modernist photography:

Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde
October 10, 2009-February 7, 2010

Some of the most innovative approaches to photography were pioneered by the Czech artistic avant-garde in the early decades of the 20th century. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, a vibrant cultural life sprang up around Prague, fueling the minds and imaginations of a generation of photographers, including Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rössler, and Josef Sudek. Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde examines the important role of objects in the Czech avant-garde's exploration of the formal concerns of abstraction. It presents 30 photographs by 10 Czech photographers, from abstract compositions of the 1920s by Funke and Rössler to surrealist photographs of the 1930s by Adolf Schneeberger and František Vobecký. Departing from conventional approaches to still life, Czech photographers experimented with dramatic effects of light and shadow, bold geometries of line and form, and unusual perspectives. The American expatriate Man Ray had a profound influence on his Czech contemporaries. Man Ray's radical experiments reached Czechoslovakia in 1922, a time of growing Czech interest in abstract art. Ultimately for the Czech avant-garde, objects provided a laboratory for formal investigations of abstract principles of light, shadow, geometric planes, and space. Within this framework, objects functioned as vehicles for abstract expression, affirming their powerful role in the creative process.

Louise Jacobson of the Washington City Paper reviews:

Unlike the pictorialist, almost old-fashioned work exhibited earlier this year in “Picturing Progress: Hungarian Women Photographers, 1900–1945” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the contemporaneous work of Eastern European men in the Phillips Collection’s “Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde” does really seem ahead of its time. From the flat, proto-abstract-expressionist arrangements of Jaroslav Rossler to the shiny, industrial-product abstractions of Jaromir Funke and Arnos Pikart, the visual and conceptual boldness of these images rises above the warm-toned, less-than-sharp printing techniques available to photographers of that era. Of special note are two compositions by Frantisek Drtikol that pair a shapely nude with angular shapes—a not-so-subtle allusion, presumably, to that most celebrated of avant-garde works, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

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