Braun, Brokoff, Sudek and Co.: Czech Baroque Sculpture in the Light of Modern Photography 

During the same period that photographic magazines were filled with debates about whether photography was an art form, photography was also making a major contribution to the formation of the reception of art. Alongside with the call to assert a new form of Czech identity, the interwar period brought a surge of renewed interest in the Baroque period. This preoccupation in fact swept even the avant-garde theatre stage, as Voskovec and Werich sang in their 1931 Golem revue that “O my, o my, Baroque is easy on the eye.” The rediscovery of Baroque art at the end of the 1930s culminated in the grandiose Celebration of Prague Baroque in 1938. In the area of the fine arts, notions of the Baroque were re-examined by art historians who mediated the epoch to the general public of the time, but it was in fact the photographs which accompanied their writing which literally brought a new outlook, particularly in terms of Baroque sculpture. Among the photographers who revealed Baroque art in a new light by working on both scholarly and popular books on art history was Josef Sudek. The photographic library of the Institute of Art History houses a large number of negatives and positives documenting Sudek’s contributions towards helping to incorporate the Baroque within the modern sensibility. At the same time, we can study his photographs in the form of reproductions printed in period publications. On the one hand we thus have undated originals where authorship is certain, and on the other reproductions dated with the year of publication at least, but often without citation of the author. My presentation will attempt to show the ways in which photography helped frame Baroque sculpture, to define Josef Sudek’s individual contribution to the formation of a new perspective on Baroque art, and the unique nature of the light in which Sudek saw and documented Baroque sculpture.