Beings from Nowhere - Metamorphoses of Academic Principles in the Painting of the First Half of the 20th century

The exhibition “Beings from Nowhere – Metamorphoses of Academic Principles in the Painting of the First Half of the 20th century” encloses the series of three main spring exhibition projects organized by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, offering almost two hundred works of art executed along the lines of classical academic principles. The event is dedicated to painters who, during the first half of the 20th century, followed up with the tradition of the 19th-century academic and salon painting. The concept of academism came to be negatively perceived as soon as it entered the morphology of European art critics and publicists, although it originally served to describe the superficial and unoriginal conserving the late 18th-century abstract of Neo-Classicism. Today, it is perceived in a more general way as a concept with universally pejorative meaning.

The exhibition presents the artistic style of painting virtuosos as Vojtěch Hynais, František Ženíšek, Václav Brožík, Vlaho Bukovac and Franz Thiele, as well as their followers, František Jakub, Oskar Brázda, Josef J. Loukota, Jakub Obrovský, and František Xaver Naske. These two artistic generations were popular with the upper and middle classes during their lifetime, and thus also commercially successful – but, at the same time, understandably hated and despised by the arriving avant-garde.

The aim of the exhibition is to reveal the nature of such metamorphoses via confronting works of art with the latest visual forms of pop culture. The affinity between the academic art of the first half of the 20th century and the visual codes of both social and political representation received a vivid picture in the form of projections of period and contemporary