<Articles>Artists and Nationalism in Prague at the Turn of the 20th Century, Focusing on Mánes Artists' Society

This paper aims to rethink the history of Czech nationalism from the perspective of modernist artists. Focusing on the Mánes Artists' Society (Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes), it analyzes the society's discourse on national terms, such as “Czech art, ” “national art, ” and “nationalism.” The first section deals with a methodological problem of nationalism studies. In the past several decades, the constructivist paradigm has played an important role in nationalism studies. Recent studies, however, have criticized the limited view of the constructivist approach, which tends to describe the process of constructing the nation as developmental and linear. In contrast, recent scholars have focused on fluidity and failures of nationalism. The thesis of Tara Zahra proposing a theory of “national indifference” was produced in this context. She focused on how nationalist activists had tried to eliminate “indifference” to nationalism and explained one aspect of the history of nationalism as the conflict between the mobilization to nationalism and people's reaction to it. The critical point here is that she defined “national indifference” as phenomena or attitudes imagined by nationalists. In contrast, recent research concerning ambiguity toward the nation and its character tends to regard nationally ambiguous people themselves as comprising “national indifference.” In order to distinguish these two viewpoints, in this paper I define national indifference as the phenomenon regarded as “indifference” by nationalist activists and see actual attitudes that seem ambiguous or indifferent to the nation as “distance” from the nation. Based on this distinction, this paper shows why and how such distance from the nation was generated by the tension between the principle of the nation and artistic motivation by focusing on the case of the Mánes Society. The second section offers an overview of the Mánes Society and the art world in Prague at the turn of the century. The society partially carried on the heritage of the former generation which has been seen as representative of “national art.” This is obvious when looking at how the society had admired the painters Josef Mánes and Mikoláš Aleš, who inspired the society's name and served as its first president respectively. Therefore, the Mánes Society did not emerge as a counter-movement to the prior generation and its national orientation. At the same time, however, the society was eager to foster an international network. As is explained below, while learning from foreign artists was sometimes criticized from a national perspective, from the beginning, the character of the society could never be reduced to the dualism of national versus foreign.