Kubišta (August 21, 1884, Vlčkovice near Hradec Králové – November 27, 1918, Prague) was an important representative of Czech modernism, a member of the art group Osma and the German art group Die Brücke, later Devětsil and SVU Mánes. In 1903 he began studying at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and the next year he transferred to the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Professor Vlaho Bukovac, but he did not finish his studies and went to Florence, where he briefly studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. From the beginning, his work was significantly influenced by expressionism and the work of Edvard Munch, but in the years 1909-1910 he stayed in Paris, where he became acquainted with the pre-cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Subsequently, together with Emil Filla and Antonín Procházka, he became the first protagonist of Cubism in Czechoslovakia. His interpretation of cubism was very distinctive, even though he used geometrically simplified shapes, it was based on a symbolist concept of art. Compared to most Cubist painters, the spiritual dimension and the content side of art were of more fundamental importance to him, and he approached the color composition more consistently. Over time, hints of futurism and fauvism appear in his works, and he reached the border of surrealism. For existential reasons, he joined the army in 1913, where he served as an artillery officer in Pula, Croatia. Shortly after the end of the war, he died in the Prague military hospital of the Spanish flu. In his short life, he created one of the most unique and important forms of modern Czech art in figural compositions, portraits and still lifes.

One of the most valuable paintings in our gallery collections is Bohumil Kubišta's painting "Glass Still Life" from 1913. This oil on canvas is one of the top works in which Kubišta completed his unique concept of cubism, which differs both from the Parisian models and from the cubist works of his friends. Analytical decomposition of objects and their new synthesis in the visual field, during which a number of events taking place at the same time are captured and the visual space is newly constructed, is brought here into pure forms, which are also emphasized by color independent of the seen reality. In the 90s of the 20th century, a number of foreign exhibitions took place, which brought the phenomenon of Czech Cubism into an international context, and "Glass Still Life", as one of the key works, was not missing from any of them.

Jana Bojanovská, August 2024