Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/78

The author of this contribution to the S. L. is an English writer and traveler. His hobby is library science and the fine arts.―Editor’s note.

My acquaintance with the admirably superior pictorial history of Bohemia began in the summer of 1920, when I one day walked into the Chicago Art Institute and viewed there the great mural paintings of Mucha, depicting the various dramatic moments in the history and development of the Slavic race. I was enthralled by these paintings. They now hang in Prague.

Having made a rather close study of the fine arts when traveling in Europe some years ago, I have now seen most of the great mural paintings of the world. Most of them never satisfied me. The work of the old masters of the Italian Renaissance always seemed too pictorial, too disregardful of the fact that mural paintings must never exceed mere decoration. This feeling naturally moved me to turn to the greatest mural painter of modern times, Puvis de Chavannes, some of whose best work is to be found in America, in the Boston Library. Here to be sure was an artist: “able to paint a vast composition on a wall without making holes in it by importunate shadows”. But what unreal figures, what obscure allegory, seeming always to have been painted with most perishable pigments, destined to fade away in the course of time. The works of Mucha, on the contratry, represented men and women as they actually were in the flesh, during most dramatic moments. These moments were delineated in a splendidly restrained style, without the slightest tendency to fall into any fatuous tableau effects. No pompous posing of the central figures, and no sentimentalism in the rendering of any incident. The colorings were sure and distinct, and yet painting had not transgressed the merely decorative limits of mural art. Fortunate the city destined to house such splendid pictorial history, thought I!

And then in my work as revision librarian at the summer session of St. Procopius College some years ago, I had the occasion to classify according to the Dewey decimal system some 7000 books in many different fields of knowledge. These books included many Bohemian works on fine art, much Bohemian history, and a number of the most representative Bohemian periodicals. I became more and more struck with the wealth of splendid pictures depicting the historical development of the Czechs. These pictures stand the most rigid criticism of their draughtsmanship and coloring; and invariably the dramatic incidents are told with that same restraint inherent in the Slavic nature, that sure taste, which never tolerates the melodramatic or the sentimental.

The long struggle of the Czechs for the preservation of their national heritage no doubt served as a great stimulus to the produc-