Václav Radimský

Městská knihovna (Municipal Library), Galerie hlavního města Prahy (City Gallery Prague), 28. 10. 2011 - 5. 2. 2012

Václav Radimský (1867-1946) belonged to the first generation of Czech Impressionists but he was not a pupil of Julius Mařák as were most of the contemporary landscape painters allied with Impressionism. In France, he saw the work of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, with Monet he worked at Giverny in a large colony of artists which Monet had brought together. Radimský was very successful in France and at home but the Czech critics never accepted him; he has only been rediscovered in the last decade.

Radimský showed at the Salons in Paris, he was given a golden medal in Rouen in 1895 and an award at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900. He maintained regular contact with his home country, he sent his works to exhibitions of the Krasoumná jednota and a representative exhibition of Radimský's landscapes at the Topič Salon was an exciting event for the Czech audience. After the First World War ended, the painter returned to Bohemia and became a commercially succesful painter. The critics, however, maintained a negative attitude to the work. They criticised his use of bright landscapes after the French model which lacked the depth found in the paintings of Antonín Slavíček, for example. After his death in 1946 Radimský fell into obscurity. Both the exhibition and the monograph will focus on the rejection of the painter's work after his return to Bohemia which, from the point of view of the young generation, had become old-fashioned and lost its topicality; this theme shall raise many unanswered questions related to the perception of French Impressionism in the Czech art milieu.

The curator of the exhibition and the author of the monograph is Naděžda Blažíčková-Horová.