Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/55

 arose in his career, the symptom of a radical change. Of this we shall have something more say hereafter.

Jindřich Průcha, although not a pupil of Slavíček, remained more faithful to his ideal. His was a meditative nature, and he made up for his lack of facility by a remarkable industry and intelligence. He had given up the study of letters for that of painting, and worked outside Prague, in a secluded nook among the mountains, whose mystic soul he wished to probe. His landscapes are therefore more than a patchwork of coloured blurs in the Slavíček manner; his colour is highly expressive and acquires an almost symbolic value. Průcha was little known to the public. His career was interrupted by service in the war, and he was killed on the Russian front in 1915.

Among the founders and the shining lights of the “Mánes” society was Jan Preisler, who died in 1917. From the very first he occupied a place apart among his contemporaries, looking backward more than they did, conscious of a larger debt to tradition than a generation of revolutionaries would acknowledge. For all that, his keen vision did not fail to catch a very early glimpse of the new art dawning above the horizon. From Ženíšek’s studio, where he served his apprenticeship, he brought away with him a profound idealism and a fondness for dreams. From his earliest attempts onward, Preisler’s work strikes a personal note. His youthful masterpiece, the “Spring” triptych, that poem of adolescence, betrays a large measure of spirituality in an age of ruthlessly realist painting. The things that the impressionists raved over seemed to Preisler thoroughly trivial and insipid. He refused to adopt a purely materialistic view of the universe, and everywhere he divined mystic bonds and relationships. Strange figures thus appeared in his pictures, figures closely bound up with the Czech countryside and having nothing in common with the types depicted in the classical Isles of the