JOSEF ČAPEK’S INTERPRETATION OF PRIMITIVISM

Josef Čapek’s writings from between 1914 and 1920 present a distinctive conception of primitivism, which was, beginning in the early twentieth century, of fundamental importance for the development of modern trends in the fine arts, in connection with the essential change in understanding the term ‘art’. Two manuscript version of the essay Umění přírodních národů (The art of primitive peoples) from 1914 to 1916 and the article ‘Sochařství černochů’ (Negro sculpture) from 1918 are amongst the first European critical attempts to interpret ethnic art. Čapek presents the ‘art of the savages’ (divošské umění) as fully fledged art, and he tries to analyse its principles of expression. He compares them to current trends in art. The essays from the volume Nejskromnější umění (The humblest art, 1919–20), which consider other dimensions of primitivism, present a particular definition and expansion of the term ‘art’. In contrast to academic virtuosity, Čapek here emphasizes values of hitherto peripheral and unacknowledged areas of artistic expression, and achieves a distinctively personal revision of the traditional conception of the boundaries of the work of art and therefore also its essence and purpose. The essay ‘Sociální užitečnost umění’ (The social utility of art, 1919) also relates to these questions.

that he brought back to Prague from Paris was a nascent but distinctive concept of primitivism. Čapek came to believe that the concept of 'art' could not be grounded in the practice of traditional institutions, and that the fundamental principles of artistic expression had to be sought outside the work done in the academies. His own art work and theoretical essays were henceforth oriented in this direction.
Upon his return to Prague from Paris, Čapek became a member of the Group of Fine Artists (Skupina výtvarných umělců), which, before the First World War, mounted exhibitions in Prague of works by Braque and Picasso and also ethnic art. Čapek took part in the activities of the group most visibly as a critic and editor on the periodical Umělecký měsíčník (The art monthly). 2 He soon quit the group, however, because of disagreements with the painter Emil Filla    Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918, ed. LeRoy C. Breunig, trans. Susan Suleiman (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972 In his review of Apollinaire's Les peintres cubistes, Čapek writes, for example: 'Modern art is a destination to which many roads lead. Obviously, not all are right; some lead back and some may lead nowhere. Morally, they may mean at least that rather than impersonally and dependently imitating the best recognized examples it is often better and more useful to attribute to those influences also something of personal interest, and at worst it may also lead, say, to a personal mistake. ' Josef Čapek, Review of Les peintres cubistes, by Guillaume Apollinaire, Volné směry 17, nos. 7-8 (1912-13) The work of Josef Čapek came to a peak in the 1920s and 1930s. The spectrum of his artistic interests at the time was extraordinarily wide. His domain was painting, but in an original way he also influenced print-making and illustration, caricature, book covers, and stage design. In parallel he devoted himself to literary work, writing short stories, short novels, dramas, and modern fairy tales for children. His literary work is crowned by plotless reflexive fiction: in aesthetics with regard to the visual arts, 1915), which was an attempt to formulate his own conception of aesthetics, starting with a critique of psychological aesthetics and following on from the 'general science of art' (allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft) of Emil Utitz . Until the 1920s, Josef and Karel lived in a close creative and intellectual symbiosis. At first they even wrote together, and as the Brothers Čapek they published not only fiction and drama but also a number of articles and reflections on fine art. Though they went their separate ways as authors in about 1912, their views, particularly concerning general aesthetic questions, continued to be in harmony and to complement each other. 'Aesthetic understanding' became Josef Čapek's methodological starting point. In his dissertation, Karel Čapek defines the term as reception that reveals the 'structure and organization of a work, its individual rules and character' , that is, reception that 'does not separate things from each other but finds relations between them' . 8 The concept of autonomous forms of art and the understanding of the work of art as a new, distinctive reality, 9 which Josef Čapek developed in connection with his interpretation of Cubism, largely comport with the ideas in Karel's dissertation.
Similarly, the bibliography to the dissertation contains a number of publications on the 'beginnings of art' , which Josef probably also drew on for his theoretical essays. 10 Josef Čapek's concentrated theoretical interest in tribal art is evident from the outbreak of the First World War onward. Čapek at the time returned to notes he had made on visits to the Trocadéro and the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin.
On the basis of these notes he began to work on his essay 'Umění přírodních národů' (The art of primitive peoples). 11 The Josef Čapek Papers include several Josef Čapek´s Interpretation of Primitivism 8 Karel Čapek, 'Objektivní metoda v estetice se zřením k výtvarnému umění' [The objective method in aesthetics with regard to the visual arts] (dissertation, Charles University, 1915), in Univerzitní studie [University essays] (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1987), 199. 9 'The expression of form must be extracted from everything random. It must be liberated from the object and must be a logical, pure expression of content, to achieve truthfulness. The work of art must become something free-standing and cannot then be compared to a natural fact, if we want to discover its truthfulness. Its truthfulness resides in the organism of the work of art and is a result of the relations and harmony of various laws, which are in its case naturally different from those in things in the physical world. ' Josef Čapek, 'Nové umění' [New art] Čapek scholar, Jiří Opelík, has convincingly dated 'Version S' to 1914'Version S' to or 1915 Its ambitious outline attempts to describe this phenomenon as broadly as possible and includes the chapters 'Africa' , 'Oceania' , 'Pre-Columbian Art' , and 'The Art of the American Northwest' . Čapek interprets the 'art of the savages' not as ethnographic material, but as fully fledged works, 'art that is original, mature, and fulfilled' . 13 He finds here basic creative principles, which are located in the 'deepest essence of art' , 14 and he reveals the original elements of the 'elementary order' , 15 which in European art had been covered over with the sediment of cultural patterns. The primitive artist, according to Čapek, directly 'materialized' his ideas and thoughts, whereas the cultured academically trained artist only describes them. 16 Čapek tries to 'read' the language of form, which is used in tribal art: he analyses 'basic formative components' , the means of expression, the structure of composition, the manner of modelling, and the conception of colour, form, and space. He focuses chiefly on those aspects that are in accord with the postulates of current art trends; of contemporary art he specifically mentions the works of Picasso, Derain, Picabia, and Archipenko. He compares mainly the non-descriptive attitude to reality with the 'modern sensibility' , and repeatedly emphasizes that the art of primitive  ' (1917), in Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art, 107-10. 20 Čapek, Umění přírodních národů. The book edition is largely the same as the original manuscript version both in the basic division of the chapters and in all its passages, except that general, introductory chapters about the origin and magical essence of art have been added. 21 Čapek, 'Negro Sculpture' . Čapek's broad conception of primitivism was not limited solely to the terrain that was 'discovered' by the artists of the pre-war generation (tribal art, the naive art of Sunday painters, and children's art), but also took into account areas that had not yet been included in the institutionally recognized conception of art. He compiled his articles and reflections on this topic in the volume Nejskromnější umění (The humblest art, 1920), which is a direct parallel to the writings on tribal art. The central article in the volume is 'Malíři z lidu' (Folk painters), devoted to the art of anonymous painters of advertising signs, 'little Rousseaus' , whose directness and truthfulness Čapek sets against the 'falseness of the artistic goods' at official exhibitions. 27 His reflections overturn established assessments of 'academic' and 'amateur' artistic expression. Čapek does not consider the expressions of the academically trained painter to be valuable art, since that painter 'relies exclusively on the receptivity of his retina and makes his technical skill and an optical impression the only starting points of his work' . By contrast, Čapek admires the work of the Sunday painter, if he starts from the 'inner world, where the arrangements and appearances of things are given by inner experience, […] where knowledge becomes one in simple, firm forms' . 28 Čapek's starting point for acknowledging artistic value is mainly the attitude towards a thing and towards the world, which is manifested in the work.
Čapek's opposition to routine academic work leads him to consider marginal areas and the overlaps between 'high' and 'low' or art and non-art in various areas. because, it seems, there is no clear-cut point at which art begins. It definitely ends with truth and beauty, but it also begins in truth and beauty. One feels better therefore down amongst matter-of-fact everyday art than amongst art fakes. The most primitive clay dish is much closer to the most beautiful vase of classical antiquity than is a showy vase on the sideboard of the owner of four tenement houses. 31 Although he was not trying to come up with a new theory of aesthetics, and tended to formulate his views only as personal declarations, Čapek's developing conception of primitivism manages substantially to expand the boundaries of the then existing conception of art. His reflections to some extent fit in with the ideas of the Czech avant-garde before the First World War, whose leading members did not rely on conventional theory and criticism and tried instead to legitimate the new art trends with their own interpretations of the laws of artistic development and the universal principals of making art. 32 In their writings, the latest in art history and aesthetics mixes together in a shared amalgam of opinion: neo-Kantian formalist aesthetics, which pushes for the autonomy of the work of art, Croce's conception of intuition as the supreme creative principle, which seizes the material and overcomes it with form, and mainly a new understanding of artistic development, represented by the Vienna School, Wölfflin, and Worringer, who substituted typological categories for the normative evaluation of artistic In the early 1920s, the ideas of Nejskromnější umění had a fundamental influence on the up-and-coming generation of Czech artists. That generation, in the early stage of 'proletarian naivism' applied those ideas in theory and practice. 34 Soon, however, the interwar avant-garde would break apart the boundaries of art, which had already been loosened up by Čapek, when they parted ways not just with routine academicism, but also with traditional forms of art in general, and would come out in support of the 'liquidat[ion of ] existing art categories' . 35 In his thinking, Čapek, formed by philosophical relativism, did not let himself be carried away by revolutionary utopia. His work continued to be oriented more to the principles of primitivism and amateurism. His theoretical writings on early forms of creativity led Čapek to reflect on the essence and meaning of art in general. In  -63, 191-95, 212-14, 228-30. 34 Teige, the leading theorist of the Czech avant-garde between the two world wars, in his first manifesto, of 1920, states that the art of the young draws 'its reserves from the sources of primary creative forces: notice its proximity to folk art, children's drawings, and the artistic expression of the tribes of the native peoples' . Karel Teige, 'Obrazy a předobrazy' [Figures and prefigurations] (1921)   than theirs, but often perhaps do mean a different essence. To be interested in the artistic ability of primitive peoples as if it were nothing more than an awkward initial groping for something that we had taken to higher levels is like wanting to put something in nappies even though it is perfect and distinctive.
If this art is accepted as a woefully impotent attempt to catch up with something like the sculptures and paintings of the teachers and members of academies, that is only evidence of the modern era's unfortunate inclination to academicized taste and kitsch. One is unable to recognize and experience art as such, perhaps because that art is grotesque and often risible, but certainly because the common European sense of form has, under the sediment of academic traditions, become hardened, curtailed, too settled in its ways, and superficial. It refuses to accept things that torment it with an unusual sensation, and it lacks a vivid sense of original invigorating forms of another kind.
Only the latest European art, under purely internal pressure, has returned to these underrated forms. Its line of development was at one necessary moment touched by the attractiveness of the art of primitive peoples, an attractiveness that had hitherto been latent. This fertile conjugation did not, however, have the aim of learning by observation and transferring primitivism and exoticism to new forms and new ground. Both are alien to serious modern art. Modern art has only needed to see in the art of primitive peoples the many components of the elementary order, components we would not find so plainly naked and striking anywhere else; many things were there for the taking. It turned out that the ways the natural, basic power of creation is expressed were simple and straight, a power that is highly original and alive amongst precisely these peoples. In reaction to this richness, it became necessary to amend many arid concepts of traditional understandings, which had stagnated and been needlessly transferred to the developmental stage, where art was experiencing a great rebirth. This rebirth had been prepared by the long development of European art, but was not given powerful direction till Cézanne's work. But the exuberant development did not wish peace and quiet or premature stabilization. The fermentation demanded more enzymes. In this development the need for continuous shocks persisted, and one of them was a violent, naive interloper into habitual ideas. It had the effect of being a refreshing stimulus, a source of relaxation, leading to simplicity, and it also tempted one to boldness. It was also one of the effective actors in the struggle for a new conception of formal space, which modern art marked out for the future as a means of new life in contrast to the bloodless survivals of mechanical tradition and superfluous eclecticisms.
Where it served as an example in this temporary influence, the art of primitive peoples was not meant to be a direct model for the needs of modern art. It was The Art of Primitive Peoples (Version S) more like a formula, akin to formulas for mathematical or, to be more precise, stereometric solutions, which were not to be scholastically applied, yet it was important to become acquainted with them. As soon as these examples were mastered, the resulting collision with the path of purely European and modern art resulted in a booming development. Interest in the art of the 'savages' originated in a natural departure from dully scholastic optical realism. Interestingly, in France the study of this art had a more fertile impact on painting than on sculpture; the most valuable results were drawn from it by Picasso, in the period when in his paintings he closely pursued the characteristics of African and Polynesian art.
André Derain also studied African art, perhaps even before Picasso. For a time, Alexander Archipenko was under the influence of Mesoamerican sculpture. Francis Picabia, an Orphist, was probably also concerned with the colour forms of the Indians of the American Northwest. Certain later consequences of the art of primitive peoples were deduced also in Bohemia, and were also applied in the development of new architecture. But in this Czech architecture, they have not inclined as closely to this temporary model as these French initiatives did.

*
The artistic power of primitive peoples is genuine and alive. It is here that we find a natural sense of form, which -mainly in sculpture, for it is always close to the original sense of form -is elementary and intense, even piercingly so. Here too we find intact the basic sense of plastic shaping laid bare, retaining all its natural ideas and the first sap of the simple conception.
We cannot, however, judge savage creations by the criteria of traditional harmony and beauty, for they would often seem ridiculous to us. What is important here is the special sensibility for transferring space into individual embryonic components and forms, sharply grasped, and a sensibility for creating their synthetic system. The Negro has a special sensibility for characterizing and presenting form, for example, the form of the human body. This is not to say that he imitates by faithfully transferring from a model as the European artists do.
Rather, he sharpens the characteristics of his subject, ruthlessly violating them, and substituting for them with some figure from his creative, abstract ideas. In consequence, he so often and so powerfully achieves synthetic simplification, geometrization, and intensive determination in the plastic shaping that his figures then seem to the European sensibility to be monstrous caricatures. This direct, unhesitating sense of form continuously stands out also in statues intended for the most superstitious religious purposes that do not require naturalistic features, but substitute the fearsomeness and cruelty of the dark divine regime for them instead. We must also admit that it is sometimes good to free ourselves and simplify ourselves with plain refreshment, because our over-cultivated sensibility has already become ensnared in the bloodlessness of handed-down forms that refined the intellect and dulled the instincts. The artistic expression of primitive peoples is primary, basic, and full of the fibres of life, which bind it to vital origins, to organic urges and instinctual paths, that is, to the deepest essence of art. It would not be right to allow oneself to be drawn chiefly to one side of the art of primitive peoples, a side that could mislead and distract by its exoticness and perversity. In addition to information concerning style and abstract construction, it is important to be aware of the formal naturalism of many of these arts, which was dominant also in pre-historic European art. Not only the simplest but also the most sophisticated and abstract forms demonstrate that they belong to human beings and originate with them. They come from human beings, become an element in their own right, and then return to human beings and the organic world. Their sensual charge brings to mind nature, their vibrancy brings to mind the animal kingdom, and their psychological essence brings to mind a child, a human being, an instinct, a feeling, a recollection, an idea. But, unlike European scholastic realism and academicism, they are never an empty copy of nature or its barren reflection. For him, reality is in any case veiled and ambiguous, so ungraspable that a sense of reality in the field of art can play strange tricks on a savage. True, the savage of the South desires to be deceived with sensation, suggestion, and everything that is artificial. For him, every phenomenon conceals something more behind it. He presents that 'something more' with the suggestive sensation of artificial forms.
Colours, forms, components, and hints all demand to be perceived strongly in his artistic feeling. The savage mind wants strong sensation. It craves this sensation and searches for elements that bring to mind, substitute for, and overcome narrowly understood and hard-to-comprehend reality, behind which the Negro believes there is something more. Just as he gives each thing a soul, a special function, and power, so too does he give these things to the components of art.
In this way the forms of art receive much content from the savage. This content often protrudes so tendentiously that it is practically written all over it.

*
The art of the Negroes is noncanonical and the things in it have only their own natural individual order. This order is already present in the germ of the creative idea, and according to this idea, and actually in it, this order develops well. It somehow sprouts wildly, for itself, only for its particular work. It is free desire, unfettered, and therefore remote from the great arts, which are like a system. It is an art that is barbarian and often childish, without high order and discipline, yet lively, in which feelings and ideas appear nakedly, directly, without ceremony.
In the indiscriminate naturalness of savage beauty there is much that is rapacious and greedy, the playfulness of simple, artificially unpretentious ideas.
It searches for the strange things that can happen to matter. Matter consists of nice pieces: it is nice how living forms enter into the uncomposed, un-mosaic-like whole, how quickly this can happen, how nicely matter thus shows itself, turns round as one likes, stands up, is carved out, is spread out, and becomes taut. All of this, which the Negro does by himself and creatively performs for himself, is often his sole aim: he requires the pleasure of amazement and wants to give himself a sudden pleasant surprise.
In this candid atmosphere, matter likes to show its own beauty and the ability to be dematerialized. If formed in this way, it manifests its poetic nature and bares its magic claws. But it does not need to be dressed up and smoothed out. It shows itself that it is lovely in its own wild invigorating nature. If this enjoyment can thus arise out of itself, if it is subjected to an independent impartiality and the bold, inventive, pure appeal of simple opinion, then the matter of artistic forming has many ways to satisfy the frank desire and curiosity to achieve new form, and the kernels of a new piece are easily produced from it.
* In Picasso's study of Negro sculptures -so long as it served as an impulse to his painting -one observes, in addition to simplifying spatial representation, a method that can usefully be called impressionism of form. Impressionism of form is the capturing of space in stereometric observations as well, but observations that are vaguer, more arbitrary, and freer than the constructive and overly projection-like rotation of objects and their volumes, which other Cubists put into the surface of their paintings. But to depict a nose as a pyramid, to make a dot instead of an eye, to make a flat rectangle instead of a complicated volume, and to record these observations in a scattered way, without an inner idea, onto a surface, this kind of new descriptiveness is not a synthetic activity. In the work of Picasso, as opposed to that of his imitators, the organic quality and unified power, the unity of feeling amongst such observations, have always been synthetic.

*
The executed ideas of form have to be mediated, integrated, have to follow on from each other and be joined, and have to create the requisite interplay between the perceptions and the usual pieces. The created space, which is borne by the formed material, is meant to be distinctive, vividly functioning, non-schematic. Otherwise it is dead, spuriously laid out, and without content. In Negro art, creative space is organically built and linked together into a final whole, in a self-evident, freely alive way -bringing to mind the vitality of nature, and in terms of architecture developed from itself, from its core, and from the consistent development of the basic idea. The joining together, affiliating, and linking of forms, and the tying together of motifs, all of that bears the fresh traces of a psychological journey; it does not happen mechanically, without a vivid improvising sensibility.
The thing created, this newly achieved space, must have its own idea. The individual space is unique, belonging to only one created thing, valid only for it, creating its plastic and poetic essence. 'Space' , in order to be experienced aesthetically, must be formal; it cannot be mere descriptive geometry. This principle is also observed in the other arts of primitive peoples, and in pre-historic European art, and must be raised as a requirement with regard to the nature of modern art. […]

Translated by Derek and Marzia Paton
The Art of Primitive Peoples (Version L)

INTRODUCTION […]
Art is creating, creating with human hands, with the human heart and spirit, creating new things that join the other integral parts of life and the world. It therefore probably begins where man first became involved with matter in order to originate it himself. In short, it begins at the beginning, in simplicity, in fundamentality, in apparent poverty, somewhere so low that few people notice it.
It begins low and deep, and can rise all the way up to compete with a god. It and paintings demand admiration. The humblest art, which I wish to discuss, also calls for your attention; it wants to provide you with a pure depiction of beneficial things, things useful to man; it is imbued with respect for labour and life, and knows both the necessity and joy that exist between both; it does not have high aims, but brings to life its humbleness by pure and poignant means.
And that is no small feat. It wants to be only the mediator between everyday things and man, but its language, though poor and modest, is usually not without a rare loveliness and quiet ardour; it is natural and truthful; it is the grace that has very often been lost by those who have eaten too much from the tree of academic knowledge. […] HENRI 'LE DOUANIER' ROUSSEAU AND SUNDAY ironed, Sunday clothes, from which a sleeve, stiff as a board, is sticking out from under a tablecloth. Tomorrow is Sunday. The family will have their photo taken or will go on an afternoon outing to the countryside or along the embankment, to count ships and bridges; perhaps they will see a floating balloon or will watch a football match. And family dinners and weddings also take place between Saturdays. Sunday is not a genre but the real world of little people, as painted by the customs officer Henri Rousseau in his simple, extremely lovely paintings.
This feeling of respect and that poignant candour of everyday life are full of seriousness and have changed into the rare purity and innocence of a painter's rendering. But between two Sundays are the workdays, and it does not seem that the amateur would let himself be particularly moved by the dramatic nature of work, but would probably much rather pay his respects to tranquil pleasure, peace and quiet.
We needn't go so far as to recall loveable Rousseau, the autodidact and master painter, for in our country we also have a great many Rousseaus, lesser and anonymous. They are the painters of shop signs. Not all those shop signs are memorable, particularly not today, because compared to the old-fashioned ones these newer shop signs are for the most part imperfect. I will explain later the causes of this decline, which, I believe, has yet to cause hardly anyone any heartache. First of all, I should like to discuss the way in which these inconsequential paintings differ from academic paintings. I hope to convince you that the difference does not consist merely in a lack of skill, but that it is fundamental and resides in the artistic approach and way of regarding the things of this world.
I have already mentioned that this art wishes to mediate between everyday goods and man. That is not to say that a nice shop sign is only a notification and enticement to get you as quickly as possible into the shop. It has often seemed to me that these simple still lifes are an expression of a poignant creed, a small altar of calm deities, ruling benevolently. It is some ardent deity of abundance, of simple virtue and quiet blessing, which rules by the sure affirmation that the things are really here. Things of practical need, everyday things; they exist; they exist here, nicely arranged, of pretty appearance and good quality. There is flour, there are loaves of bread, there are eggs and milk, there's coal, everything that people need.
And just as the eggs and the loaves of bread are not a mere impression for the Even better, one could say that the objects painted in these humble still lifes model themselves, willingly develop themselves with a graphic approach, offer themselves to the viewer with realistically matter-of-fact colour, and show themselves to him lucidly in the simplest spreading out and concentration from the inside out. So, for example, a shadow is either a simple grading of local colour or belongs directly to the object; it is a fixed component of the object, a necessary result of roundness or squareness, of the spatial power of things.
That is the great difference between them and more demanding paintings for art dealers. Imagine an academically trained painter as he composes his still life into picturesquely arranged light, trying, in all sorts of ways, to find the most suitable arrangement: whether to light it from above, whether to shade the windows from the left or the right. And he copies them with this desired, combined, but in fact arbitrary light, because these things would exist anyway, even without all the interesting lighting and its effects that are spread out over their surface. One could therefore say that he copies this lighting and these surfaces on which the shadows and light slip across and are caught on, rather than the things themselves. And if he sets them up as models, it sometimes happens that he has thereby set them up completely apart from himself, that he has set them too far away, so that by even this short distance they become alien to him. So, where the one person relies exclusively on the receptivity of his retina And now this more primitive painter endeavours, by means of a creative approach, to mediate his own experience of things to the viewer, to encounter the viewer's own experience, and thus to achieve mutual agreement about the depicted object.
Art truly needs some kind of mute, natural agreement between artist and viewer, assuming of course they are not absolutely contrary in spirit, as is the case, unfortunately, in these days of the crisis of no style. It is fair to assume that in the unified style periods this kind of spontaneous agreement was in operation between the viewer and art. This agreement is necessary in order for art to be able to persuade, to meet with a similar state of mind, and to avoid misunderstandings.
Otherwise, an expression of style oriented solely to the optical would seem pointless, unnatural, ineloquent. Anyone who sees with eyes spoilt by admiration for, say, Makart or Lenbach (to go further afield for my examples) will consider even the nicest shop sign to be mere naivety. 1 But surely nothing can be brushed off that way. Someone who looked impartially, with a bit of earthiness, would without a doubt be rewarded with the insight that simplicity is usually endowed with the rare gift of not being superficial.
The sign painter does not copy his model, but recalls it from his inner consciousness.
It is natural that an elementary, uncomplicated, artistic rendering is linked to a fundamental way of looking at things, because just as the amateur's heart is simple, so his artistic means are pure and direct. Here the line remains true to its primary role, and firmly, emphatically, and illustratively cuts the object out of the emptiness of the background, and embraces it firmly, but lovingly, with sincere earthiness. It creates a precise and meticulous boundary of objective colours; and it should come as no surprise that because of its honesty it sometimes ends up somewhat stiff and ponderous. From the start, the line becomes an essential component of the composition: it deploys forms on the surface of the painting, it stakes out and sets boundaries in which the colour and plasticity of things stand out. Not stopping at details, the line appears magnanimous, curt, even poor.
Colour is linked directly to it; simply the edge, the border, the boundary of objective colour is also the outline of a form. The colour surface of things is modelled by itself, generally not by adding another colour, but by increasing the lightness or that. Yet it is a simple, melodic harmony and the simplest proportionality between the object and the creative representation. In art that has this clarity and sincerity of intention, things seem almost sacred and their respectful, modestly magnanimous simplicity is true warmth.
This kind of simple painter undoubtedly does not even persuade himself that he is facing a vision that he would want, when inspired, to capture in his painting.
He wants to makes loaves of bread, sacks, bottles, paper cones full of spices. It almost has less to do with creating than with making a thing on the surface of a painting, a thing he now recalls from an inner experience of life, and wants to make as close as possible to something real: undoubtedly, he desires to make it beautiful. He pursues that goal along a simple, direct path, which guarantees the purity of the artistic work, the clarity, prettiness, and strikingness of the painting; by this path of making real the humble artist often draws remarkable magic out of his own soul and the painting is filled with a charm and special mystery that can lend reality an almost spiritual nature. Things seem to be made beautiful by simplicity; sometimes it is beauty and pure comfort and those things appear as new and as clear as a landscape after the rain. They are nourished and revived with the breath and warmth of the human heart in which they intimately resided. They are elevated by the heartfelt sympathy and understanding that one can bring to everyday things. In another still life, for example, they reside in exalted peace, as if on a holiday of the world: that is the peace and quiet of the soul, which has thus blessed them. At other times they exist in a drowsiness of resignation and unconsciousness or are delineated as if in a slow, heavy awakening: the simple soul was, broadly and without interruption, astonished at being. True, we often find here a bit of the drabness of the world as well. So go and get rid of that bad taste by trying something else: here things raise themselves up proudly and prickly; the world is full of edges on which we have hurt ourselves many times.
In general, however, the folk painter loves things the way he knows them to be. He loves the whiteness of sugar and flour, the colourfulness of material and wrappings, the warm brown and circularity of loaves of bread, the soft roundness of bottles. So he depicts them nice and white. He draws them out and circles them with respect and thoroughness. And the painting bears the innocent traces of this material love. The painting appears meticulous and moving, even though it was made by a coarse and clumsy hand. The painted things seem to have stood up themselves in devoted astonishment at their own emergence and existence.
They then persist in the sinless existence of the material. They sometimes seem almost sanctified: the bags of flour -though so similar to each other -rise up venerably like idols. And many loaves of bread, so pure and round and clear to everyone, seem to be not talking about a struggle for bread, but to be a reminder that bread was the body of the Lord.
But not all shop signs are as pretty as I have described them here. The painter's technique can be unskilled, uncultivated, lacking in nimbleness and harmony.
Sometimes the lines rise up a little bit slanted, become stiff, and fall over.
Sometimes they rise up almost threateningly. The colour black is no longer the colour of a new Sunday suit, but becomes an almost infernal tar. The painting has been intruded upon by a strange excitement, confusion, hardness, disproportion, wildness, and bellowing. And all of that testifies to a hard struggle. But don't think that you will necessarily be faced here with failure, gaping at you dully and barrenly. All of this might be beautiful, and not simply because the painting is rocking and reeling about dizzily and in the convulsions of the struggle.
Nonetheless, it persuades one that life and reality, in the dizziness of clumsy expression, fight their way out all the more fiercely, in leaps, rearing up, and colliding, in efforts accompanied by a bit of terror like everything in blind fervour.
In any case, it elevates the pure amateur thing far above kitsch, because the living possibility of greater perfection, improvement, even beauty, is always in that thing. But kitsch cannot be improved; it would never become beautiful, for it is bad to the core. In front of baker's shops I saw some painted loaves of bread that could almost be transferred straight into a Giotto fresco. If you tried to do something like that with kitsch, which is brimming with technical obscenities, you would immediately be persuaded that it could not be transferred without In any case, a bit of an old-world mood clings to those still lifes, consisting partly in their simplicity and their style. They are on the whole usually not completely lacking in tradition, so it cannot be said that they would always be totally virginal creations. For one thing, they have their own tradition, the tradition of the workshop in which the craftsman worked; this is the way in which the models, the style, and the overall nature and composition are transferred. This method of painting is most closely associated with the rather dry yet poetic painting of the Empire period and later. And it seems that shop signs in particular have remained untouched by Romanticism. In individual cases, the model has been transferred across an even greater distance -namely, from the reign of Empress Maria Theresa and also the Rococo. But these are neither determining influences nor a school. The spontaneity and naturalness which move one in the work of the amateur, the folk artist, is in his case a plus.
It can now finally be admitted that few shop signs merit the praise that I have lavished on them. No one should therefore think I was lying if he or she does not like the first sign they encounter in their street after having read these pages.
Sign-painting has in recent times fallen into dreadful decline, if one can put it so tragically. I don't know whether the vocational schools are to blame, but this decline can definitely be ascribed to the disruptive power of the modern age.
Naturalism, ornamentalism, and Impressionism have made their way in here, and the last named of these easily becomes a cancer, which is frighteningly able to corrode the strong, clear face of a painting, gnaw away at a drawing, corrupt colour, destroy form and composition, and veil forms and things. I have documented it elsewhere several times, particularly in the common landscape paintings of today, which overfill exhibitions and shops with art, but I have not sought to turn that into an argument against Impressionism. Well, that is amateurism in the bad sense of the word, where high style is parasitically imitated, facility is feigned, and tricks, technique, and emptiness are blown up to be something that we sometimes encounter perfectly executed. I have seen academic painters' and sculptors' works presented with great allure and ambition, and yet they were nothing more than a relatively successful imitation of art. But the new shop signs are terribly done.
So much for moderation; they are a coarse, empty, inelegant, smeared daub of ugly colour. The rendition has become horribly superficial and the technique is a bungling, muddy mix, the utter negation of all the basic means of expression.
And all the painter of today does is skilfully apply a slightly better mixture of painterly techniques to a nicer subject in order to make a pretty looking morsel for the superficiality all around us. And, surprisingly, it definitely does not occur to him that a poor relation is gazing at him from above. […]

Translated by Derek and Marzia Paton
Folk Painters

JOSEF ČAPEK: WHAT WE ENCOUNTER
A wily artist, a would-be expert, often fails to pull off a work, and the results are often quite depressing. The amateur, the folk painter, manages to do something, and we are surprised by the charm and wisdom of his good intentions and the pretty thing.
I am not talking here about folk art in the ordinary sense of the word, that is, traditional, rural art. Here I mean contemporary folk art, the work of craftsmen and ordinary amateurs, an art that tends to be urban, or, better said, suburban.
But I see that I always call it art whenever it has to do with art that is not intended as art and has no ambition to be art whenever it is without pre-established and followed models and criteria. It is art that comes into being by means of simple work, simple technique, and truly humble ideas. The naturalness and sincerity of the creative approach here are fertile soil for good opportunities and results. It is a great poverty, but a poverty that is not without purity. Art likes to spring forth even from barren soil, which is not exactly fertilized with the grand deposits of cultural manure. Or, let's say, not finding enough fertile soil here, this art, rather than grow up to be proud flowers, buds into a small, unimpressive, but beautifully We sometimes find that ordinary people, simple craftsmen, potters, and woodcarvers manage to do some good work. It is a clay cat, a toy made for the pleasure of children and a place to put their pennies, ponderous as an artless letter full of spelling mistakes, but made with a sincere heart. Grey like an old idol, enclosed in calm illustrative outline, lively, emphatic, and summing up everything in its details, with the dapper whiskers of a lecherous cat, like a red, haughty, and stupid little loaf of bread, the kind we used to see when we were children. Yes, indeed, this naive little lump of plain clay is far from a piece of Royal Copenhagen, but it is -take note -also far from a mediocre or bad piece of Royal Copenhagen.
I came across dishes in the Prague suburb of Břevnov, decorated with a few little flowers like something from the beginning of the world, delicate and clumsy, like a father's kiss.
In Moravia I saw a new hallway painted with landscapes, a painting that was both repulsive and enchanting, whose trees and mountains immediately bring to mind Chinese paintings and the most charming Rococo painters. I also saw other paintings in farm hallways, similar to old frescos. At glassmakers, amidst the most unsightly goods, one finds goblets and vases decorated with flowers, which seem like fresh new revelations. There are advertising calendars and hanging pressed-paper letter-holders, the astonishingly bad taste of which is sometimes balanced out by a special expressiveness and trueness, which are indescribable. I used to like coming across the newspaper ads of one tree nursery, where an ordinary man, a plainly depicted gardener, not rustic, very austere and undemanding, is wrapping up a little tree. Its genuine 'simple beauty' delighted me. There is unmounted crochet work decorated with flowers and butterflies of the maker's own invention, the delicate vegetation of dreams, whose charming and sweet naturalness is a true pleasure for the eye and the mind.
I used to like to look into the window of a shop with musical instruments.
The shop was full of rows of standing and hanging brass trumpets, horns, and tubas, which created a sparkling gallery that breathed the peace and quiet of a real musical still life just like the ones the old masters loved. For, just as there is the art of spectacle, there is also the beauty of real still lifes, a quiet beauty, and the delectable positive side of things, displayed to be seen, a shop window that shows and speaks, the poignant little shop window, where kale as well as chicory and a scrubbing-brush are lovingly placed beside apples and a brown enamelled pot, creating a little domestic world which one feels good to be in. As a boy, here in front of these little shops, I was filled with sweet astonishment at these things.
And it seems to me that Picasso seriously failed to compose, in addition to his still lifes of wood, newspaper, and tin, a pretty shop window with these kinds of tin, wood, and clay things, to show how much he loves them.
I think I've gone off on a tangent. I was supposed to talk about art, even if it was the most minor kind, and I have come instead to an enumeration of things.
That's because it is a matter of charm, the charm of things and also the charm of the human relationship with those things, and that relationship can go all the way up, in hardly perceptible boundaries, to a great and noble work of art, because, it seems, there is no clear-cut point at which art begins. It definitely ends with truth and beauty, but it also begins in truth and beauty. One feels better therefore down amongst matter-of-fact everyday art than amongst art fakes. The most primitive clay dish is much closer to the most beautiful vase of classical antiquity than is a showy vase on the sideboard of the owner of four tenement houses.
I have the cheapest children's toys, chickens, made by a Prague woodcarver who is hard of hearing. They express all the good mimetic instinct and all the perceptive wisdom of the ordinary man who has entered a competition with an artist. The first requirement is a design that best corresponds to the effortless, quick technique of manufacturing something on a lathe. This manufacturing should be as uncomplicated and inexpensive as possible, achieving the maximum

JOSEF ČAPEK: THE SOCIAL UTILITY OF ART
I As he works, tired and getting old, a man who is granted a look at even a single tree growing green amongst the walls whose stones imprison him feels better, less oppressed. Life travels along a chain of days that seem all the same, and becomes exhausted. The days grow shorter, and we will soon live again in the desolateness and darkness of winter. A view of a tree that in its crown carries the changes of the four seasons whose lively charm and sequence are always full of hope fills the mind with emotion and consolation. Is the sight of a tree whose leaves were so fresh in spring but are turning yellow and falling now in order to bloom again, is this view that moves and consoles one, a pleasure? Before being a pleasure, and more than being a pleasure, it is part of life, expanding the The muse does not look the other way when the cabinetmaker carefully produces the cobbler's bench, but she flees in horror at the sight of furniture for snobs. Art The Social Utility of Art is not a luxury, nor should it be, and one can imagine that it would thrive even in modest circumstances.

II
True, it has long been our experience that massive, truly great works of art were easiest to make with the support of art-loving tyrants and patrons. But, by contrast, a considerable number of outstanding works in our day were made anonymously, without general interest, indeed under the most onerous, obstructive circumstances. One cannot call today's public an art-loving tyrant. In addition to their many good qualities, recent times have also excelled in their utter lack of taste, which could at least be a slightly reliable guide in the labyrinth of what is desired and chosen.
The culture of past eras was in that respect more compact, more uniform. There was less uncertainty. If one devoted part of one's money to art, one would in all probability really get some art for one's money. Today, the opposite is often the case: the greater the expense, the lower the probability. In 1200 one got simple furniture for a little bit of money, more splendid and fancier furniture for more money, and magnificent furniture for a lot of money. The difference was in the costliness and the excellence, not in the spirit. Today, for a little bit of money, one gets bad furniture, for more money one can get almost a parody of art, and for 20,000 crowns you can get a stern, strident polemic against art. There is a certain consolation in that, a guarantee, and almost a bit of hope that art will not necessarily serve luxury, for which there should be no place in times of social rebirth, whose programme includes neither the rich man nor wastefulness.
Where it begins from the start, from anything where it is not something rare, where it is not evidence of luxury, art does not have to be the wastefulness of a tsar. If socialism intends to satisfy art by building a'palace of the people' instead of palaces of the emperor or the archbishop, little will be achieved, for in that way only the users of the palaces will have changed places, nothing more. And it would also be too little if -as the good king of France who wanted each of his subjects to have a chicken in his or her pot every Sunday -the benevolent dictatorship would hang an original on the wall of every worker or if it carefully confiscated all the art collections from privileged private hands and concentrated them in galleries where no one would go anyway, unless forced to do so. It is not, however, a question of art being given a more popular, more general place, of it 'being the property of everyone' . It is rather a matter of once again achieving the justification for its existence and regaining its essence. It is odd that socialism too considers art a luxury, a special offshoot of culture, a fine by-product of civilization, just as perfumes and iridescent dyes are made as derivatives of coal tar. They What is essential about art is that it can truly begin from the beginning, that it can also be present in the simplest things, if it is done by the natural way of work, activity, and general creation. The possibility of form resides in all materials, in all purposes, in all ideas. In earlier days that was convincingly manifested many times.
Today, too, one may hope that the natural conditions for everyday art have not yet been lost, that they have not ceased to exist either in the relationship of privilege or of service, which was established in recent times between the artist and society.

III
Tolstoy somewhere names three kinds of useless people: civil servants, industrialists, and scholars and artists, and defines them in the sense that they ride on the back of the working man, live only from his work, because they themselves do not work. They are not in an active, working relationship with the soil and the earth.
Indeed, they avoid it -and they turned their idleness in the material struggle for their livelihoods and their parasitic participation in the work of others into their way of life.
If I understand him right, Tolstoy here considers the struggle with the soil to be the only real work, so that it satisfies man's needs, and provides him with foodstuffs and life. It is not my task to defend bureaucrats and industrialists, but it really does seem to me here that Tolstoy has conceived work and the relationship with the soil too much like a muzhik. I do not think that an active relationship with matter and the earth is conducted by means of the mattock and the spade, just as the relationship with God need not be restricted only to prayer.

The Social Utility of Art
On the contrary, science too has a very active relationship to matter and to the earth. After all, to what end does eternal restlessness drive science to search for things and to penetrate them by means of questions and answers? It is a search for all the causes and the meaning of existence, and also the search for God. All of that is the struggle with the soil (for we do not live on other stars and spheres) and it returns us to matter and the earth. Man does not free himself so easily from matter and the earth, nor does he ask for that. Because he himself is matter and the earth in another form, and there is no other way. And art! The artist creates his work with matter and reality. A painting or a play is by its existence a thing, just as a machine, a tree, or a man is a thing. I said that art in its essence accompanies work. Can you set a clear-cut boundary where art begins and work, that is, an active relationship to matter, ends? If someone makes a simple table or chair and really goes to great trouble to ensure that this table is made as well and as beautifully as possible, he is mainly making a table, but it already contains an element of art. Art is already in the joy of work and the perfection of work. The first blow of the axe cutting into the tree trunk and of the chisel into the stone is a gate through which work and art enter into matter together. It depends on how much of that art you let burst in. And ultimately there is not just one kind of work.
Work can be bad or good. Similarly, the bad worker, as much as the bad artist, stands in an utterly poor relationship with matter and the earth. And Tolstoy should have listed the bungling craftsman far behind his parasites who ride on the backs of the workers, for the bungler devalues both work and matter.
In opposition to the voice of Tolstoy, one can hear another, equally powerful voice, the voice of Rodin, an artist no one can accuse of having a low opinion of art. Rodin has put forth the view that today, when work is considered a bother and an unpleasant necessity, only art is done out of a joy of work and its perfection. When, says Rodin, I see a bricklayer laying one brick after another out of the mere joy of work and its perfection, for me this bricklayer is an artist. Those are words that in their own way outstandingly characterize the moral crisis of today, the grievous materialism of the unenlightened proletariat, whose spirit is combative and desirous of redress, but has also been made weary from a life of work, because it is poisoned by a false, crippling view of work and man. Its sensibility has been sorely tried and is in revolt, and it sees work only as being necessarily connected to the fetters of servitude and slavery. In essays about the nature and basic causes of art one too often talks about an 'inner necessity', a necessity that may be categorical, but is, rather than servitude, a free act, the far from unpleasant necessity that we have already discussed. Without this free inner necessity, the disgusted, bad worker is like the sleepwalker who without a clear consciousness and inner involvement acts under the pressure of that unpleasant alien necessity to work, and the sleepwalker is aware only of the efforts connected with it. That is a truly bad state of affairs, leading to aversion and unwillingness. Nor should one be surprised that in addition to all the achievements and progress, modern times are also an era of bad quality and shoddy production. It is probably unnecessary to add that this characteristic of the times has deeper moral consequences, which also affect a wide variety of aspects of life in the arts.
In a completely unexpected and unintended way, Rodin's words demonstrate that labour and art cannot be separated from each other as something alien and disparate, and that, on the contrary, art, which is a continuous 'endeavour to achieve perfection' , can be an example for labour. Therein may be the first social utility of art in times of crisis, rebirth, and stabilization, its primary moral value, and a ray of light in the darkness.

Translated by Derek and Marzia Paton
The Social Utility of Art