Antonín Slavíček, born in May 1870, was one of the founding figures of the Czech modern art movement. He was an impressionist painter known for his landscapes of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands and Prague. As a child, he would paint during his studies and was sent to Munich where he learned to work with oil paints. When he returned, Slavíček began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under the guidance of Julius Mařák, another Czech landscape painter.
Slavíček grew up around the hustle and bustle of city life in Prague and decided he needed a change of scenery. He was really interested in Kamenicky and was taken aback by its beauty when he first visited. Slavíček depicted this beauty in his paintings. He did not care about capturing objects realistically, but rather capturing the atmosphere. The people of Kamenicky are grateful for his paintings, as they are like time capsules of their land and how things used to be.
U nas v Kameničky, Antonín Slavíček
Jan Zrzavý, born in November 1890, was a leading Czech painter who worked along the lines of neoclassicism and magic realism. Zrzavy was never accepted into the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, but that did not stop him from living up to his dream of being a painter. During the last years of his life, he became known as a national artist and would be recognized on the streets with his famous beret and cane.
Zrzavy painted scenes of Brittany and Bohemia, representing the landscape with geometric figures. There is a common theme of pointed hills in his paintings. According to Radio Prague, the motif of pointed hills can be viewed as something transcendental that breaks the horizontality of the landscape and of the material world. His landscapes depict a world where nobody has stepped foot before or a world where everyone left.
Fantasticka Krajina, Jan Zrzavý
Written by: Savannah Rodriguez
Sources:
Navrátilová, Barbora, and Tomáš Pancíř. “Antonín Slavíček: Prominent Czech Landscape Painter.” Radio Prague International, 23 Jan. 2023, https://english.radio.cz/10-most-famous-czech-painters-8765931/4.
“Jan Zrzavý • Museum Kampa.” Museum Kampa, 9 July 2018, https://www.museumkampa.cz/vystava/jan-zrzavy-en/.