Knihy o umění - Nejskromnější umění, Málo o mnohém, Umění přírodních národů – Čapek Josef (2024)

The volume of the Book on Art presents the theoretical-critical, essayistic, and journalistic activities of Josef Čapek, encompassing for the first time in completeness (both textual and visual) his works on visual art and culture that he published in book form. Additionally, it includes as an appendix the preserved original versions of The Art of Natural Peoples. This extensive text by Čapek on art was and remains not only a pioneering and popularizing work in the history of visual arts and, at the time (not only in our country), a unique anthropological study, still undervalued from this perspective, but it is also a testimony to the essence and principles of artistic sensitivity and creativity, a personal confession. Painter and writer Josef Čapek, in his pursuit of an open perception of forms and possibilities of artistic creation – of art that is internally experienced, character-driven – consistently devoted himself to so-called marginal areas of art and their distinctiveness. Alongside expressions that are immediate, simple, purposeful, anonymous, and naive, crafts and modern technical achievements, new media, questions of taste, urban folklore, etc., he studied and profoundly described the forms of primitive, or rather ethnic, art. The collections The Most Modest Art and A Little About Much fall into the context of his post-war journalistic activity, programmatically enriching the theme of the primitive...