SLAVÍČEK, Antonín

Czech landscape painter, a founder of the Modern School of Czech painting, noted for his expressive landscapes and city scenes. Slavíček was born in Prague and from 1887 to 1889, and again 1894-1899, studied at the Academy of Graphic Arts under Julius Mařák (1832-1899), who considered him his most gifted pupil. He inherited his teacher's studio after Mařák's death in 1899, but soon closed shop to pursue his own creative paths. He was a member of the Mánes Union of Artists and took part in their exhibitions from 1898. He later developed a style derived from ImpressionismGLOSSARYA style of painting that became prominent in the last quarter of the 19th century as a reaction to the ossified doctrine of the Academy and the content-oriented atelier, historical, and genre painting. The name is derived from the 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet, and first was used by art critics as a mocking description for a group of artists excluded from the official Salon, but who had their own first group exhibition in 1874 at the salon of the Parisian photographer Nadar. Impressionism, as a new type of naturalism, negated classical pictorial methods; based on contemporary theories of physics, it indicated the natural object in a revolutionary fashion - entirely as a manifestation of colour. Their supreme principle was "plein-air" or open-air painting, through which the painters tried to capture a direct, spontaneous impression of what they saw..

In 1907 he visited Paris and Brussels, and he was attracted to the work of the painters in the Barbizon schoolGLOSSARYA group of naturalist landscape painters who worked in the vicinity of Barbizon, a village on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleu, southeast of Paris, in the 1840s and 1850s. Théodore Rousseau (French, 1812-1867) was the founder of the group. Other members of the group were Jean-Baptist Corot (French, 1796-1875), Narcisse Diaz de la Pena (French, 1807-1876), Constant Troyon (French, 1810-1865), Jules Dupré (French, 1811-1889), Jean-François Millet (French, 1814-1875), and Charles-François Daubigny (French, 1817-1878). Their approach constituted an art movement which eventually led to both Realism and Impressionism. Daubigny was the first of the plein air painters.. He committed suicide at 39, after suffering a stroke which left him unable to paint.

Slavíček was influenced by Impressionism and is usually identified with that movement. Unlike the French, however, he was less interested in form than in conveying emotions through pure light and shade. After 1900 his style grew increasingly abstract in its original use of colour.