Czech Cubists built on the French modernism of the mid-19th century but adopted its principles not in mechanically reproduced form but through genuine acts of creativity founded on personal intuition. Emil Filla succinctly summed up their outlook in a study called ‘Life and Work’ published in Art Monthly: ‘Stylistic will is impossible in this era and will always be suspect and cheap as in the distractedness of this age it will inevitably degenerate into stylisation and archaic imitation. The creative work of the individual will require the artist to employ feeling and intuition to re-determine and select for himself a form suited to his creative instinct. In the place of a form generally embraced we shall have the formal sensibility of the individual.’
The title of our book, Rembrandt’s Tram, is not intended as a futuristic or dadaistic play on words. It is a metaphor for the challenges of the subject this book focuses on. Coupling the name of an acknowledged old master with the modern means of transportation portrayed in a painting by Vincenc Beneš, this also being the name Russian avant-garde artists gave to their exhibition in 1915, has a certain paradox to it, which comes to light when considering the links between Cubism as the most current and controversially adopted movement of the given time and earlier and a-stylistic forms of expression. Among Czech art historians these issues have been addressed most thoroughly by Vojtěch Lahoda, who is currently celebrating an important birthday, and to whom we have dedicated this publication. The book was prepared by a team of art historians at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences that includes both experts in modernist and avant-garde art and researchers specialising in the medieval and the early modern eras and studying Cubist inspirations from the perspective of early art. Thanks to this cooperation between these two camps the book explores a rich array of novel approaches to the study of Cubism and its ties to the cultures of other eras and other continents.