Negotiations of Socialist Modernity: The Czech Glass Figurine (From the Late 1940s-1960s)

Abstract

This article presents the glass figurine as means of understanding making and socialist modernity in Czechoslovakia during the first two decades of Socialism (late 1940s-1960s). Through studying the work of glass artists such as Jaroslav Brychta and Miloslav Klinger, I show how these small, apparently humble figurines offer insight into the status and hierarchies of objects made for decorative and commemorative purposes. They show us the methods through which Czech practitioners actively negotiated socialist modernities. Czech glass figurines have held a somewhat uneasy position in canonical hierarchies, impacted by their associations with souvenirs, export, kitsch and humor. However, state approval endowed them with a certain gravity conditioned by selective historical and material associations. Authorities hoped the figurines would offer a form of ideological interpretation of socialism accessible to their consumers. I present the varying roles allocated to the figurines, which were bound to key ongoing narratives concerning craft and the modern inherited from the pre-Socialist period. The figurines enable understandings of the pluralist nature of craft in Socialist Czechoslovakia, providing a new reading of this under-attended area within international scholarship.

Keywords:

• glass
• socialist modern
• Czechoslovakia
• figurine
• communism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Karel Zeman Museum, Prague; the Zeman family; the Museum of Glass and Jewellery, Jablonec nad Nisou; the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague; and the North Bohemian Museum, Liberec, for their kind assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Dedication at the beginning of Inspirace. Directed by Karel Zeman. Filmové studio Gottwaldov, 1949. The film is a special feature on the DVD for the Karal Zeman film, Invention for Destruction currently distributed in the UK by Second Run (2018).

2 Karel Zeman, before and after 1949, experimented with many different materials and filmmaking techniques. According to his daughter and granddaughter, Linda and Ludmila Zeman, in producing Inspirace Zeman wanted to create a film that was “poetic and technically challenging” (Correspondence with Linda and Ludmila Zeman, August 2020). Due to Zeman’s respect for the glassmakers of Železný Brod, he approached Brychta who responded with enthusiasm. Zeman was well-known and his films were screened internationally. Inspirace received several awards including, Best Puppet Film at the Grand Prix at the Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1949; 2nd prize at the International Film Festival of Documentary and Experimental films in Montevideo, 1954; and the Golden Sheaf award for the Best Film at the International Film Festival of Documentary Films in Yorktown, Canada, 1958.

3 Susanne K. Frantz, “Twentieth-Century Bohemian Art in Glass: The Artistic and Historical Background,” in Czech Glass 1945–1980: Design in an Age of Adversity, ed. Helmut Ricke (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 25.

4 Verena Wasmuth, “Czech Glass in the Limelight: The Great Exhibitions Abroad” in Ricke, Czech Glass, 86.

5 The administrative authorities and territorial borders of these areas have changed over the centuries, but as a brief outline the Czech lands are made up of three regions: Bohemia, which is the largest historical region of the Czech lands, occupying the western part; Czech Silesia, which borders Moravia, Poland and Slovakia; and Moravia, the eastern part of the territory. They all joined with Slovakia in 1918 after gaining independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, forming Czechoslovakia. In 1992 Slovakia declared itself a sovereign state and the federation was dissolved in January 1993 to become the Czech Republic (now also referred to as Czechia) and Slovakia. I use “Czech” to focus in on specifically Czech glass makers, but “Czechoslovak” to acknowledge the wider official political territory and country in which these makers operated from 1948 to 1989.

6 A key example is Ricke, Czech Glass 1945–1980, as well as Antonín Langhamer, The Legend of Bohemian Glass (Zlín: Tigris, 2003). My PhD on this topic attempted to also address this imbalance by comparing concepts across media including textiles, ceramics, film and interiors, Rebecca Bell, “Questions of Craft: Making for the State in Socialist Czechoslovakia” (PhD diss., Royal College of Art, 2019).

7 See Oldřich Palata, The Glass World of Jaroslav Brychta, (Liberec: North Bohemian Museum in Liberec & family of Jaroslav Brychta; 1995). Other relevant publications include: a small catalogue issued by the Museum of Glass and Jewellery in Jablonec nad Nisou in 1998 - Milan Hlaveš, Skleněné figurky [Glass Figurines] (Liberec, Praha, Brno: Hoblík a Hlaveš, v.o.s., 1998); Antonín Langhamer, Milan Hlaveš, 100% SKLO [100% Glass], (Praha, Železný Brod: UPM v Praze a SUPŠS v Železném Brodě, 2010); and Petr Nový, Pohyb–výraz–emoce: Figury a figurky v českém sklářském umění a řemesle [Movement – ​​Expression – Emotions: Figures and Figurines in Czech Glass Art and Craft] (Jablonec nad Nisou: Muzeum skla a bižuterie v Jablonci nad Nisou, 2015); as well as wider discussions in: Ricke, Czech Glass; Antonín Langhamer, The Legend of Bohemian Glass (Zlín: Tigris, 2003); and Sylva Petrová, Czech Glass (Praha: Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, 2001, 2018).

8 Terms such as “kitsch" and “trash” were used frequently at this point, and throughout the Socialist period in Czechoslovakia, stemming from earlier twentieth-century debates. There is a trajectory of discussion particular to the Czech context, discussed in the 1930s by writers like Bohuslav Brouk and Karel Teige, debated in relation to fascism during Nazi occupation in World War II, and to socialism in exhibitions and magazine articles throughout the Socialist period. This can be seen in regular features during the 1940s and 1950s in art, craft and design magazine Tvar [Form]. Its wider history is discussed by Milan Pech in “Umĕní a kýč” [Art and Kitsch], in Konec avantgardy? od mnichovské dohody ke komunistickému převratu [The End of the Avant-Garde? From the Munich Agreement to the Communist Coup], ed. Hana Rousová, Lenka Bydžovská, Vojtěch Lahoda et al (Řevnice: Arbor vitae, 2011), 317–330. This adds new scholarship to relations between craft and kitsch as oft-contested grounds, a debate associated with Western European schools like the Bauhaus, and Modernist writers like Clement Greenberg. See also T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

9 Ivo Digrin, “A Universal Assortment,” Czechoslovak Glass Review 2 (1958): 16; and Karel Hetteš, “Reflections on the Aesthetics of Glass,” Czechoslovak Glass Review 8 (1958): 11.

10 Frantz, “Twentieth-Century Bohemian Art in Glass,” 21.

11 Ibid., 20.

12 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (London: Duke University Press, 1993).

13 Frantz, “Twentieth-Century Bohemian Art in Glass,” 21.

14 The Czech National Awakening, also referred to as a National Revival, originated in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, and concerned the revival of Czech language and culture in the Czech Lands. The Czech nation was seen to grow from an inherent and collective sense of history. The Czech lands joined with Slovakia in 1918 to form the state of Czechoslovakia, after gaining independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (ruled by the Habsburg Monarchy). The Awakening also resulted in the production of material culture stemming from an ethnographic interest in traditional folk art, textiles, clothes, ceramics and architecture. For discussion of the latter, see Hubatová-Vacková, “Use and Abuse of Folklore and Folk Art” in Budování státu. Reprezentace Československa v umění, architektuře a designu [Building a State: The Representation of Czechoslovakia in Art, Architecture and Design] ed. Milena Bartlová, Jindřich Vybíral et al. (Prague: UMPRUM, 2015) 67–73.

15 Ibid., 16

16 Zuzana Peštová and Arsen Pohribný, “Železný Brod – its Glass and School: On the Occasion of the Glass Exhibition at Železný Brod,” Czechoslovak Glass Review 1 (1966): 76.

17 “Reorganisation of the Czechoslovak Glass Industry,” Czechoslovak Glass Review 1 (1946): 11

18 During the First Republic (1918–1938), the role of Czech language had impacted social hierarchies, assigning minority status to 3.5 million German-speaking citizens and 1.5 million Hungarians, Ruthenians, Jews and Poles. See Milea Bartlová, "How a State is Made" (English section), in Bartlová, Budování státu, 4.

19 The Czech reluctance to annul the Decrees (potentially resulting in claims for the restitution of property) caused doubts as to whether the Czech Republic should be allowed into the EU. See “A Spectre over Central Europe,” The Economist (August 15, 2002), http://www.economist.com/node/1284252 (accessed December 21, 2015).

20 Rick Fawn, Jiří Hochman, Historical Dictionary of the Czech State (Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2010), 85.

21 Edward Taborsky, “Political Developments in Czechoslovakia Since 1953,” The Journal of Politics 20, no. 1 (1958): 102, 90.

22 Rick Fawn, Historical Dictionary, 106.

23 A. A. Ždanov, O umění [About Art] (Prague: Orbis, 1950).

24 Cited in Tomáš Vlček, ed., Modern and Contemporary Czech Art 1890–2010 / Part Two (Prague: National Gallery, 2010), 42.

25 Shawn Clybor, “Socialist (Sur)Realism: Karel Teige, Ladislav Štoll and the Politics of Communist Culture in Czechoslovakia,” in History of Communism in Europe: Vol. 2, Avatars of Intellectuals Under Communism, ed. Corina Palasan & Cristian Vasile (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2011), 144.

26 Jan Mergl, “The Artist and Industry 1945–1965: Conditions, Potentials and Results of the Artist-Industry Relationship,” in Ricke, Czech Glass, 74.

27 Antonin Langhamer, “The Organisation of Production and the Development of Design in Czechoslovak Glassmaking (1940s-1980s),” in Ricke, Czech Glass, 410.

28 Antonín Langhamer, Glossary in Ricke, Czech Glass, 424.

29 Advertisements for the firms of Josef Barta and Rudolf Lubas, Czechoslovak Glass Review 4, no.1 (1949): 1 .

30 Dr Zdeněk Vodička, “In Praise of Bohemian Glass: Notes on the Exhibition of Czechoslovak Glass and Jewellery held in Prague in September and October 1955,” Czechoslovak Glass Review 1 (1956): 8.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Dedication at the beginning of Inspirace, by Zeman.

34 See Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Middleclass Values and Soviet Life in the 1930s,” in Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Vera S. Dunham, ed. Terry L. Thompson and Richard Sheldon (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 36.

35 The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia (1975 text published in 1979 edition), http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/socialist+realism (accessed December 27, 2015); also “The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in English,” The Russian Review 35, no. 1 (January 1976): 77–93.

36 Ibid.

37 Deema Kaneff, Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a “Model" Bulgarian Village (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books , 2004), in Nicolette Makovicky, “Traditional – with Contemporary Form: Craft and Discourses of Modernity in Slovakia Today,” Journal of Modern Craft 2, no. 1 (2009): 52.

38 Katherine Verdery cited in Haldis Haukanes, “The Power of Genre: Local History-Writing in Communist Czechoslovakia,” in Memory, Politics and Religion: The Past Meets the Present in Europe, ed. Frances Pine, Deema Kaneff and Haldis Haukanes (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2004), 94.

39 Ibid.

40 Jan Mergl, “The Artist and Industry 1945–1965: Conditions, Potentials and Results of the Artist-Industry Relationship,” in Ricke, Czech Glass, 77.

41 Vodička, “In Praise of Bohemian Glass,” 8.

42 Frantz, “Twentieth-Century Bohemian Art in Glass,” 21.

43 Langhamer, “The Organisation of Production,” 424.

44 Ibid.

45 The word “spartakiáda” was coined in 1921 by the Czech founder of the Workers’ Federation of Sports Associations, Jiří Chaloupecký.

46 Vladimir Macura, “Spartakiad,” in The Mystifications of a Nation: "the Potato Bug" and Other Essays on Czech Culture, ed. Hana Píchová and Craig Cravens (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 93.

47 At the 1954 Third National Meeting of Propaganda Instructors, the organisation of the 1955 Spartakiad was accompanied by demands that all evidence of Sokol, which had officially been dissolved in 1952, was removed. Both Spartakiad and Sokol slety promoted tradition and folk motifs to invoke a revolutionary spirit and reward athletic endeavour: the two iterations can mainly be differentiated in quantitative terms the size of event, number of exercises, number of regions involved and the existence of regional Spartakiads. State organisers were keen to remove Sokol’s bourgeois, capitalist associations. (See Macura, “Spartakiad,” 93–100).

48 Edith Pargeter, The Coast of Bohemia (Pleasantville, NY: The Akadine Press, [1950] 2001), 187.

49 Jindřich Švec, “Upomínkové předměty pro I. celostání spartakiadu” [“Souvenirs for the First National Spartakiad”] Tvar 7, no. 5, (1955): 134.

50 English Summary in ibid.

51 Ibid., 134.

52 Pavla Frýdlová, “Women’s Memory: Searching for Identity Under Socialism,” in Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe, ed. Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová (Indiana University Press, 2016), 101.

53 Advertisment for Pražské kosmetické závody [Prague Cosmetics Company] Tvar 1 (1953).

54 Frýdlová, "Women's Memory,” 101.

55 Marie Majerová, “Chvála spartakiády” [“Praise of the Spartakiad”], in Mucha, První celostátní spartakiáda 1955 [First National Spartakiad 1955] cited in Macura, “Spartakiad,” 100.

56 Petr Roubal, “Politics of Gymnastics: Mass Gymnastic Displays under Communism in Central and Eastern Europe,” Body & Society 9, no. 2 (2003): 8.

57 Ibid., 20.

58 Švec, “Upomínkové předměty,” 134.

59 Ibid., 134.

60 For example, columns like “Odmítáme!” [“We Reject!”] Tvar, 1, no. 2–3 (1948): 64.

61 Josef Vydra, “Osloh v lidové tvorbě,” [“On Style in Folk Art”], Tvar 2 (1949): 206–214. Cited in Lada Hubatová-Vacková, ed., Modfolk. Modernita v lidovém: Ateliér designu oběvu a obuvi Liběny Rochové na UMPRUM [Modfolk. Modernity in Folkness: Studio of Fashion and Footwear Design of Liběna Rochová at UMPRUM], (Prague: UMPRUM, 2015), 31.

62 Lada Hubatová-Vacková, Martina Pachmanová & Pavla Pečinková, eds., Věci a slova: umělecký průmysl, užité umění a design v české teorii a kritice 1870–1970 [Things and Words: Art Industry, Applied Arts and Design in Czech Theory and Criticism 1870–1970], (Prague: UMPRUM, 2014), 555–556.

63 Related notions of kitsch, taste and their relationship to design and the applied arts were frequently discussed in publications from this time. For example, “Odmítáme!” [“We Reject!”] Tvar 1, no. 2–3 (1948): 64; Raban, J. “Moderní nebo módní” [“Modern or Fashionable?”] Domov 1 (1961): 34.

64 Kimberly E. Zarecor and Vladimir Kulić, ‘Socialism on Display: The Czechoslovak and Yugoslavian Pavilions at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair’, in Architecture Publications (Iowa State University Digital Repository, 2014), pp. 226–239 (p. 231) <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/38934213.pdf> [accessed 8 March 2019] and Cathleen M. Giustino, ‘Industrial Design and the Czechoslovak Pavilion at EXPO ’58: Artistic Autonomy, Party Control and Cold War Common Ground’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:1 (2012), 185–212 (p. 210–211).

65 “Brussels Reporting,” Czechoslovak Glass Review 2 (1958): 1, 6.

66 "Brussels Reporting," Czechoslovak Glass Review XIII, 3–4 (1958), n.pag.

67 Digrin, “A Universal Assortment,” 16; Hetteš, “Reflections,” 11.

68 Karel Kosík, “Hašek and Kafka,” Telos 23 (Spring 1975): 86–87. (This essay was originally prepared for the Liblice Conference on Kafka in Prague, 1963.)

69 Soviet First Secretary Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalinism in his 1956 “secret speech” at a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, began a process of de-Stalinisation. Khrushchev’s denouncement of Stalin’s abuse of power in a speech entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” initiated the period known as the “Thaw”. The coining of the term is allotted to Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 Russian novel The Thaw. Thaw culture was characterised by the slow freeing up of censorship and discussions of democratic thinking. Historian Vladimir Kusin has noted that whereas revolts in Poland and Hungary in 1956 demonstrated widespread discontent with the existing regime, “in Czechoslovakia the outcome lay more modestly in the awakening of the intellectuals,” enabling reform from outside of Party structures. See Vladimir V. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: the Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956–1967 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971), 19, 27; Ilya Ehrenburg, Ottepel [The Thaw] (London: Harvill Press, [1954] 1955).

70 Kosík, “Hašek and Kafka,” 88.

71 Drawing upon Chrisoula Lionis’s discussion of humor, humorology, and the grotesque – particularly in relation to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, in Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 8–15. The response of humor is also seen across varying media in craft practices under Socialism in Czechoslovakia, as explored in my PhD thesis, “Questions of Craft”.

72 Kosík, “Hašek and Kafka,” 86.

73 From Kusin, discussing Stát a člověk [State and Man], by Zdeněk Mlynář, published in 1964. In his book, Mlynář called for a theoretical analysis of political reality, demanding an end to false thinking, to “strip the system of its mythical clothes”. Kusin, The Intellectual Origins, 40.

74 Kosík, “Hašek and Kafka,” 88–87.

75 Ibid.

76 Maruška Svašek claims that a Brno exhibition named The Founders of Modern Art in 1957 was the first public opening up of abstraction away from Socialist Realism (See Maruška Svašek, “The Politics of Artistic Identity. The Czech Art World in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary European History 6, no. 3 (1997): 383–403). But from 1955, my research shows there were adverts in Tvar for purchasable reproductions by Modern artists considered controversial under both Nazism and Socialism, such as Václav Špála, who had also worked for applied arts organisation Artěl (founded 1908) – thus connecting the trajectory of modern fine art and craft across pre and post-war periods. From this we can see, although craft was not a tool for explicit political subversion, nevertheless its environments enabled a certain creative flexibility, where pre-Socialist intellectual pursuits could be continued and parameters tested. The grip of Socialist Realism was also loosening from the mid-to-late 1950s and in the fields of craft and design, this was heavily impacted by the attention received for Czechoslovak work at the 1958 Brussels Expo.

77 Vladimír Šolta, Výtvarné umění [Fine Art] 1, no. 3 (1950): 110, cited in Svašek, "The Politics of Artistic Identity,” 388.

78 As David Crowley has noted, studio crafts were considered “politically mute” under Socialism and Susanne K. Frantz writes that craft and industrial design were fields ‘assumed to be incapable of subversion’. See David Crowley, “Stalinism and Modernist Craft in Poland,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 1 (1998): 81; and Frantz, “Twentieth-Century Bohemian Art in Glass,” 32.

79 Makovicky, “Traditional with Contemporary Form,” 43–58.

80 “Editorial Introduction,” The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 5.

81 Langhamer, “The Organisation of Production,” 424.

82 Milan Otáhal, Normalizace 1969–1989: příspěvek ke stavu bádání [Normalization 1969–1989: Contribution to State Research] (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2002), 6, cited in Libora Oates-Indruchová, “The Limits of Thought?: The Regulatory Framework of Social Sciences and Humanities in Czechoslovakia (1968–1989),” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 10 (2008): 1767.

83 A characteristic criticised by Deryck E. Viney in “Czech Culture and the New Spirit, 1948–52,” Slavonic and East European Review 31, no. 77 (1953): 492.

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Rebecca Bell

Dr Rebecca Bell holds a PhD in Czech craft under Socialism from the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art. Bell is currently Lecturer in Fashion Visual Cultures at Middlesex University and has a background in contemporary art commissioning for the public realm. Her research focuses on making practices under politically controlled conditions, looking at realisations in glass, ceramics, textiles and fashion.