Bohumil Kubišta was born on 21 August 1884 in Vlčkovice near Hradec Králové and died on 27 November 1918 in Prague. This Czech painter, graphic artist and art theorist is considered one of the founders of Czech modern painting. Together with Emil Fila, Antonín Procházka and five other artists, he founded OSMU, a group of expressionist-oriented artists.
Bohumil Kubišta was the illegitimate son of a poor rural family, so his path to art was not easy, but he made it his own. His uncle, the teacher Oldřich Kubišta, supported him financially. Already during his studies at the real grammar school in Hradec Králové he showed interest in fine arts. He attended drawing and painting courses at the Industrial Museum and lectures by Max Dvořák on modern art. After graduating from high school in 1903 he studied at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, but after a conflict with the school's director the following year he transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Vlaho Bukovac. Even here he did not last long and left the academy due to conflicting views on the direction of fine art. In 1904 he entered military service at the school for reserve officers in Pula. After graduating in 1906 he went to Florence, where he became a student at the Reale instituto delle belle arti. In addition to drawing and painting, he also attempted printmaking. He was not satisfied with the academic style of teaching and left the school before the end of the first semester. In the autumn of 1906 he undertook a tour of Europe with his friends Emil Fila and Antonín Procházka.
In the spring of 1907 he returned to Prague to join the Osma art association, which held its first exhibition. It was held without much public interest. Kubišta exhibited 14 works, including his own likeness and pastels from Pula and Florence. At that time he met F. X. Šalda, who became his future supporter. In the following period, he worked intensively, but was still struggling with existential problems. He found almost no buyers for his paintings. In November 1907, he enrolled to study architecture at the Technical University in Prague, but only lasted one year.
With the financial help of his uncle, he went to Paris in March 1909. He stayed there until the end of June, studying contemporary French art, especially Paul Cézanne. He was also there as an unofficial envoy of the Osma group and the Mánes Association of Artists, with the aim of arranging an exhibition of young French artists for Prague. He went to Paris a second time in December of the same year and stayed there in difficult living conditions until June 1910. In addition to his uncle's support, his financial problems were helped to overcome by various theoretical essays and studies on the visual arts that he wrote for F. X. Šalda. In Paris he made contacts with French artists and gallerists as well as other German and Czech painters. In March 1910, he was admitted to the Mánes association.
From the mid-1910s he lived and worked in Prague. He wrote critical articles about the older generation of landscape painters from the circle of the magazine Dílo, which irritated the Czech environment. He waged an uncompromising struggle to promote a new artistic style. He came into conflict with Josef Ullmann, who physically attacked Kubišta after his reaction to the display of a painting of a donkey. The scandal was settled in court and ended with Ullmann's apology.
Kubišta was appointed secretary of the Club for Old Prague. He ended his collaboration with Šaldo's magazine Novina, and wrote for Česká kultury and Přehledu. In the spring of 1913, his financial situation forced him to rejoin the Austrian army. He was assigned as an officer to the fortress artillery in Pula and his new duties meant a decline in his artistic activity. He continued to serve in Pula during World War I, even taking part in the sinking of the French submarine Curie in December 1914. For this feat he was awarded the military Order of Leopold, and by the end of the war he had been promoted first to lieutenant, then to the rank of centurion.
Kubišta arrived in Prague on 27 October 1918 on leave and was one of the first to enlist in the Czechoslovak army after the declaration of independence. Shortly afterwards he fell ill and died of Spanish flu at the age of 34.
He is buried in the cemetery in Kukleny (since 1942 part of Hradec Králové). His tombstone with a large relief and the inscription "To contain life with a strong pull" is the work of sculptor František Bílek.
Bohumil Kubišta left behind 128 oils and pastels and a number of graphic works.
In 1920, thanks to his friend Jan Zrzavý, a posthumous exhibition of Kubišt's work was organised in the House of Artists of the Czech-German Krasoumné Unity (Rudolfinum).
Kubišta was strongly influenced by Munch's exhibition in Prague in 1905 and in the period 1905-1907 he moved from academic post-impressionism to expressionism (Self-portrait in Havelock, Triple portrait with Bedřich Feigl and Artur Pittermann-Longen (1907), Players, Third class passengers).
He participated in both exhibitions of the Osma in 1907-1908. As a consistent and theoretically based personality, he became the unofficial spokesman of the Osma, advocating the new concept of art in his artistic reports and in his fundamental theoretical reflections on the culture of the time.
"The significance of colour is that it really has the quality of not only harmonious but of true mystical symbolism" wrote to Jan Zrzavy in 1915. He was convinced that modern art was based on the principle "understand and fulfill the law" as well as historical styles. He studied colour theory (e.g. he considered the contrast of red and green as a clash of life and death), analysed harmonic and compositional principles of old and modern masters (El Grego, Eugene Delacroix, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch). His paintings were based on a strict balancing of individual formal elements, he applied complementary and simultaneous colour relationships and the compositional principles of the golden section (Café, Still life with lamp, Smoker).
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