Západ slunce na moři – Hájek Lubor (2010)

Lubor Hájek is one of those figures in modern Czech culture whose work is still awaiting adequate evaluation. Although he primarily focused on the artistic expressions of many non-European cultures, his professional identity is multifaceted: he was, to varying degrees, a collector, expert, curator, art historian, popularizer, and occasional poet. He fundamentally built the Collection of Non-European Art at the National Gallery. He also left behind an extensive collection of texts of various kinds and genres. His research and literary work opened Czech art history to the world in the true sense of the word and is comparable to the legacy of such phenomena in Czech art history as Kutal, Lamač, Krása, or Šmejkal. The book of Hájek's studies and essays, Sunset over the Sea, summarizes texts from various periods, mostly published in Czech and foreign scholarly journals or from the researcher's estate. Hájek focused on ancient and archaic art, such as Neolithic ceramics, Sumerian-Akkadian art, and the broad issues of Chinese and Japanese portrait, sculptural, and graphic art, as seen in articles like Anonymous Chinese Painting from the Song Dynasty, Kung Hsien's Album of Landscapes from 1637, and On the Dialogue of East Asian Art and Europe,…