The Cubist Museum

This cubist museum of Prague is not a huge museum but it is absolutely worth seeing.  It occupies the three floors above the Grand Orient Cafe.  This cubist mecca of Prague is exponentially impactful since both the café and the museum are housed in an incredible specimen of cubist architecture called, The House of the Black Madonna.

The Grand Orient Cafe is on the floor with the balcony in the model above, as you can see the windows are very uniquely cubist and that balcony railing is in the post for the cafe.

Even the windows on the top floor of the building are made up of interesting angles.  I particularly like the way that the window panes themselves are sunken in to the full structure of the window.

The staircase alone was worth the fifty crown price of admission.  It was almost disorienting walking up this staircase between the lightbulb shape of staircase and the unusual angles of the railings themselves.

One more observation about the building itself.  As you can see the above roof beams continue the style of odd cubist angles.  The vertical beam in the bottom photo has a corner running up the entirety of the beam.

Now on to the art!  Above is "Head" by Otto Gutfreund. I love the above face, it seems very distinguished and strong.

"Tramway No. 4" by Vincenc Benes.  Here is a great rendition of a Czech tram running along a cobblestone street.  It is most likely set in the old city since that is where many narrow winding streets are.

"Glass and a Bottle" by Emil Filla.  The two squares in the lower right hand corner of this painting caught my eye.  Filla did an incredible job of capturing the grain of the wood.

"Kiss of Death" by Bohumil Kubista.  The color of this painting in person is quite intense.  It makes the piece feel very cold, but natural at the same time.  It is also fascinating how the chest of the living person seems in a way more angular and bare then the chest of the skeleton.

"Coastal Cannons Firing at a Navy" by Bohumil Kubusta.  This was my favorite piece in the museum.  The more time that I spent viewing it, the more layers and meanings that emerged.  This was another vibrant painting in a museum of muted colors and pencil sketches.  A few things to look for that I found interesting are the ship with the three barrel canon at the top, the targeting sight at the top left, and the exploding shell on the left.  There is great imagery of the new (at the time) mechanized warfare, represented by the gears and machine parts, juxtaposed with the old technologies, represented by the wooden steering wheel of a ship on the right of the painting.  One more thing to take notice of is the pooling red at the bottom of the painting which clearly represents the losses of war.

There was a large wall of the same cubist font that was used extensively in The Grand Orient Cafe below the museum.  The only piece of cubist furniture that grabbed my attention was the chair below.  It seems to me that it was a funky cubist take on a wing chair.  Not to mention that the gold and black vertical stripe made the chair a natural centerpiece to this particular floor of the museum.