Czech avant-garde, expressionism and cubo-expressionism · 1884 -1918

Bohumil Kubišta subjects modern emotion to a rigorous architecture of colors, triangles and ellipses, making Cubism a spiritual as well as formal language.

Bohumil Kubišta was born in 1884 into a modest rural family in Bohemia. After studying in Prague which began in 1903, he quickly left academic staff and traveled to Florence and then to Paris. The discovery of Edvard Munch and the European avant-gardes accompanied his transition from post-impressionism to tense expressionism. In 1907 and 1908, he participated in the two exhibitions of the Osma group, the Eight, of which he became one of the most demanding theorists. He studied the laws of color, harmonic relationships, perspective and compositional principles of the Old Masters and modern painters alike. This analytical desire does not cool the image: it allows him to opposite of concentrating emotion. Self-portraits, cafes, landscapes, urban scenes and religious figures are constructed by angular planes, complementary contrasts and geometric rhythms. In San Sebastian of 1912, often read as a symbolic self-portrait, cubist forms and expressionist content come together. Green can mean death, rounded shapes organic matter and angles a transcendent dimension. Kubišta also served in the Austro-Hungarian army and died in Prague in 1918, a victim of the flu pandemic, at only thirty-four years old. His brief career nevertheless exerted a decisive influence on Czech modernity. preserve geometric structure, controlled color violence and the balance between analysis and inner tension. The "Bohumil Kubišta" selection offers its own journey on this subject. His reading favors movement.

In Kubišta, geometry takes nothing away from emotion: it compresses it to the point of making each angle, each green and each diagonal a psychological sign.