Twentieth Century Painters [antikvár]

I. PAUL SIGNAC, MOTIF FROM THE BOSPHORUS IT WAS NOT ONLY APOLLINAIRE who said that next to France, and together with Spain, Bohemia was in his time the strongest bastion of modern art in Europe. In the years immedi- ately preceding and following the First World War it was generally known that Prague reacted very readily to everything new and progressive that came out of France and held the promise of future development and of permanent universal value. As early as 1902, France herself learned of Rodin's greatness as a result of his first collective exhibition abroad, which was held in Prague. Edvard Munch, too, was welcomed there in 1905 with an exhibition of all his work, the second he had outside his own country. Somewhat later, Antoine Bourdelle and Joseph Bernard made their world début by exhibitions in the Bohemian capital, encouraged to do so by Rodin, who advised his pupils to exhibit in Prague in order to gain access to the inter- national forum. Af,er the war Prague saw a number of large exhibitions of contemporary French art, that of Picasso s work in 1922 being one of the most important expositions of the artist who started a new era in European art.