Untitled

This assured canvas by Emil Artur Longen features vivid, unmixed colors, vigorous brushwork, expressively distorted imagery, and flattened space—all hallmarks of Czech Expressionist painting. While still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Longen participated in the first Osma exhibition in 1907, two years after the group’s founding in Prague. Osma—Czech for “Eight” (also called Die Akt in German)—was the first modernist movement in Czechoslovakia bringing together young artists of Czech, Jewish, and Bohemian-German parentage from all parts of the country. German Expressionist aesthetics from Berlin, especially from Herwarth Walden’s (1878–1941) Galerie der Sturm, exerted a strong stylistic influence on Osma members including Longen, as did the work of German Expressionists whose art was exhibited in Prague at the time. An admiration for contemporary French art, especially Fauvism, introduced vibrant colors to the figural distortion and emotional immediacy that characterizes Longen’s and other Osma paintings.

Even with its gloss of stylistic innovation, this depiction of ancient Prague could have remained a conventional, picturesque city view, however Longen has transformed it into an unsentimental image of the modern metropolis. While the simplified forms of Prague’s famed medieval castle rise in the distance, the composition’s real focus is the city’s warehouse district and bustling river life, crowded with commercial barges and traversed by a steam train racing over an up-to-date metal bridge—an iconic symbol of modern urban and industrial life.