Civilist Poetics (1940's)

The work of the generation of artists affected by World War II was influenced not only by the sufferings of war, but their work was also a synthesis of pre-war avant-garde artistic trends such as Futurism, Cubism, Civilism or Constructivism. The authors were also inspired by the Surrealist methods, and they were inclined towards existentialism. Their driving motif was the city, the periphery, the life of the ordinary person.

A symbol that embodied the everyday problems of the individual in society during the German occupation became the subject of the night walker by František Hudeček; a loner walking through a cityscape of factory halls, railway stations and sports stadiums. Also the oil painting of 1943, The Witness, which we can see here, belongs to a long series of drawings, graphic works and paintings by Hudeček with the same and yet completely different portrayal of the night walker. In 1968, he described his fascination with this motif as follows: “A late night walk around the railway station, where no other light could be seen than scattered flickerings, and their reflections in a network of rails, diverging as if empty, into nothingness ... And the stars, a sea of stars, which you will not see in the city. But in the desperate black war of darkness, the heavens were full of them. Surely the most eloquent image of the anxieties that were choking humankind at that time – but also the hope that could be drawn from such images of a man lost in the cosmos but at the same time permeated by its rays, its stars ... "

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Now we’ll go down a floor to look at the second part of the exhibition A Century of Relativity with artworks from the second half of the 20th Century.