Abstract
Josef Čapek and his journey to the periphery of Art by Jan Huleja is an interdisciplinary examination of two early collections of essays and articles The Humblest Art (1920), and A Little about a Lot (1923) by the painter and man of words Josef Čapek. Summarizing his theoretical, critical and essayistic activity of the 1910s and 1920s, these work incarnated a radical challenge for the elitist art destined for a restricted group of artistic public and represented an antithesis of the principles of L’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) subsiding Parnassianism in the field of fine arts.
Both works encourage questioning of the nature of relationship between highbrow and lowbrow art, their merging and mutual influence. What they share is the orientation towards artistic periphery – the production of untrained authors and anonyms, primitive cultures, children or mentally ill and also the aesthetic value of the objects of everyday use.
The chapter seeks to prove that these artistic confessions of Josef Čapek were, seen from a broader perspective, a part of a unified tendency of the 1920s towards simplicity, ordinariness and everydayness and reverberated with some of the artistic movements of the beginning of the twentieth century (Civilism, Naturism, Pragmatism, Vitalism, and also Fuctionalism) and they were acclaimed especially later in manifestos of Poetism and Naivism which they shaped and helped to define. The author’s further intention is to demonstrate the timelessness of Čapek’s ideas which critically reflect upon the contemporary crisis of the aesthetics of home which is often devoid of a personal dimension and full of indifferent prefabricated objects and pseudo-art.