Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Czechoslovak National Handicraft Tapestries of Frantisek Kysela

Illustration: Frantisek Kysela. Czechoslovak National Handicraft tapestry, 1925.

Frantisek Kysela is a well-known Czech fine art painter whose major working career was during the 1920s and 1930s, he died in 1941. Kysela was not limited to fine art painting as he was also an accomplished designer and decorative artist and produced work in a number of mediums including glass, ceramics, jewellery, textiles, carpet and tapestry.

It was a series of tapestries designed by Kysela and produced for the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industrieles Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, that stood out as one of the key examples of what was to become known as the Art Deco style. However, it can also be seen as a series of contemporary fine art images produced by one of Czechoslovakia's new generation of artists.

Kysela produced a series of eight unique but linked tapestries with the theme of various traditional handcrafts that were native to Czechoslovakia. They were commissioned by the Czechoslovakian government to decorate a specially organized exhibition held within the Czechoslovakian pavilion. The exhibition within an exhibition so to speak, dealt with and had the title of Czechoslovak National Handicrafts.

Two of the tapestries held at the exhibition were reproduced as illustrations in one of the numerous catalogues that were available at the Paris exhibition. The two illustrations shown here are from one such catalogue. Unfortunately neither was reproduced in colour, however, the compositional style and narrative are still clear and shows the exceptional skills that were involved in both the initial design and eventual making of the tapestry series.

Illustration: Frantisek Kysela. Czechoslovak National Handicraft tapestry, 1925.

These eight tapestries must have done much to reinforce, with both the audience at the exhibition and that of the world at large, that the country of Czechoslovakia, which less than a decade ago had been carved out of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, was in fact an integral and equal part of the modern world. This interest in the modern and the contemporary was very much a theme that ran through many of the exhibition pavilions at the Paris exhibition.

The Czechoslovak National Handicrafts exhibition showed a country and culture that had an intrinsically defined and secure craft tradition. However, what was intriguing was the fact that the country was also able to reflect those seemingly ageless traditions by interpreting them in a healthy contemporary modernist style as portrayed by one of their leading artists of the day, Kysela.

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