The social scope of Bohumil Kubišta’s Cubism in Habsburg Prague

Bohumil Kubišta is known for his expressionist, cuboexpressionist, and cubist paintings made between 1904 and 1918. While he employed traditional 19th-century genres, the nature and tone of these works reveal modern problems of social dynamics in a divisive and imperial present. Attending to the resonance in his writings with early 20th-century imperial problems of class tensions and ethnic division reveals how Kubišta adapted cubism to suit his own intellectual and artistic agenda. For Kubišta, the search for visual means to represent invisible spiritual qualities led to exploration of cubism to evoke this intangible but crucial marker of the modern social condition. Representation of the modern spirit by employing cubist form is manifest in his military canvases. Kubišta came to identify with his role in the Habsburg military. As his correspondence and cubist military portraits indicate, Kubišta the imperial officer saw himself as an artistic outsider, a status that allowed him considerable intellectual and artistic freedom. Kubišta’s writings produced during the years of military service closely echo leftist ideas prevelant in public discourse stemming from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. His texts also reflect his knowledge of the Vienna School of Art History’s ascription of form and content to the particular ethos of a given culture. These connections can be detected in his art, which reveals his attention to the complicated fabric of industrialization, class and ethnic conflict, imperial hegemony, art-world cacophony, and the conditions of women’s labor. Kubišta’s adaptation of French cubisms to social content becomes evident by unpacking the content of his work immediately predating and including his experimentation with visual strategies gleaned from cubist form. Acknowledging the full scope of Kubišta’s leftist motivations for blending social content with experimental visual strategies makes it clear that he was not merely keeping up with Paris, but indeed created a new outlet for cubism through its application to social questions in an imperial context.