Krajiny umění - Švýcarský kritik William Ritter a střední Evropa – Galmiche Xavier (2021)

The Swiss critic William Ritter (1867–1955) was the first French-speaking author to systematically engage with the cultural life of Central Europe. This enthusiast of neo-idealist theories explored a world where, thanks to art, the 'boundaries between life and dream' disappear, and he quickly recognized that the real territories where he could admire landscapes of an ideal world were located in Romania, Hungary, Montenegro, Albania, Bohemia, Moravia, and in the 'Slovak region.' In his critical essays on artistic, musical, and more generally cultural-historical events in Central Europe, he became an original and symbolic mediator of the atmosphere at the end of the 19th century. William Ritter settled in Vienna in 1893 and then in Munich from 1901, with a two-year break (1903–1904) during which he stayed in Prague. During this time, he discovered many famous and now forgotten artists (he also became the 'teacher' of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, later the modernist architect Le Corbusier, who traveled 'to the Orient' thanks to him – through Central Europe and the Balkans). This monograph focuses on the period between Ritter's first trip to Prague in 1888 and his hasty departure from Munich at the beginning of World War I in 1914...