Medieval Pastiches in Central European Modernism. The Cases of Alfons Mucha and Ivan Meštrović
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Vyžádané přednášky |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | In this paper I present two main case studies that build the starting point of an investigation about the reception, appropriation and exploitation of medieval art forms in early 20th century modernism in Central Europe. Its focus lies on a comparison between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. These two states emerged after the breakdown of the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empires in the First World War. The two new countries have a lot of features in common: they are home to a variety of peoples with different languages, dialects, religions. The majority population is Slavic but the minorities are numerous and manyfold. Nonetheless, the common cultural denominator was meant to be Slavic. This paper addresses how artists from both countries assisted in the invention of such a Slavic culture. Prominent figures in the endeavour were Alfons Mucha and Ivan Meštrović. Both were very well known and established. The engagement for the national cause only enhanced their prominence. Curiously, both Meštrović and Mucha referred in their artworks to the saints Cyrill and Method, two brothers and monks from Greece who had played an important role in Christianizing the Slavic world in the 9th century. As the presentation will show, reference to these two saints is popular in much of Eastern Europe until the present day. But mostly, the paper will focus on the early 20th century and try to answer the following questions: How did the two artist operate with medieval art forms exactly? How did they combine it with contemporary artistic language and therefore create an idiosyncratic modernist style? I will also investigate how transnational or transcultural this Slavic art was, because it aimed at an aesthetic and maybe even „ideological“ synthesis of the Romanesque and the Byzantine. |
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