Page:Modern and contemporary Czech art (1924).pdf/73

 from it and converging to it, in various convolutions, are allegorical groups in bronze, symbolizing the successive phases of the Czech renaissance. A, naked and emaciated, her wings broken as if after a fall from a dizzy height, represents our prostrate country after the Battle of the White Mountain. The group in which a two-headed monster is trampling on a frail woman, recalls the persecutions of our people under German domination. But on the opposite side, the first harbingers of the revival are already raising the Czechoslovak, breathing new confidence into him and directing him to the lofty teachings of history, as Palacký rescued it from the obscurity of the past to serve as an example and a warning. And history herself, a monumental Sibylline figure, stands by the side of the tall pylon, surrounded by a swarm of figures that twine and rise about it to leap finally to its summit. Here, from the top group, a hand emerges to point upwards to the stars of re-awakened Bohemia, while, horizontally, the “Herald” darts like a lightning-flash from this whirl of figures, using his hand as a trumpet to proclaim to the world that a new nation has come into being and is struggling for its independence. These visions in bronze around the pylon and its summit are the truest expression of Sucharda’s effort, conceived as they are with an impressionist imagination, and seized, as it were, like snapshots from a camera. The clinging draperies are deeply furrowed with a restless rhythm of folds, producing quite a pictorial play of light and shade; the faces and gestures are imbued with a convulsive pathos. We may indeed point to a certain lack of balance in outline and mass, and condemn the preponderance of the architectural over the sculptural element, but the sincere, passionate and vivid expression of the whole and of the details bears the best possible witness to the aims and the capacities of this most typical of Czech impressionist sculptors.