Group 42 / Matters of Art, Matters of Time

Art detects reality, creates reality, uncovers reality, the world we live in, and we who live. Art, in its purposes and intentions as well as its themes is nothing other than the everyday, frightful, and glorious drama of man and reality: the drama of an enigma confronted with a miracle. If modern art is not capable of this, it is pointless.
Jindřich Chalupecký: Svět, v němž žijeme [The World We Live In]
This book is based on an exhibition of the same name held at the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen that presented an extensive private collection of work by Group 42 (Skupina 42) and offered art historian Marie Klimešová a new opportunity to explore the celebrated phenomenon of Czech modern art. The book is logically structured into three sections – pre-group, wartime, post-war, and ending around the year 1948. Following a simple chronology, the group’s poetry is stylistically and thematically described and contrasted against the contemporary context of art. The experimental nature of early work from the 1930s reveals the strong individualism of the emerging artists, who sought their own form of expression in the space between Surrealism and Cubism. The wartime drift towards civilism and the post-war movement towards experiment and figurative symbols are presented with a complete collection of remarkable paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, and small sculptural work by all the members of Group 42 (Gross, Hák, Hudeček, Matal, Kotík, Lhoták, Smetana, Souček, Zívr). The collection demonstrates the variety of outlooks of this group of artists who later had a strong impact on the post-war generation of artists. The book contains a selected list of exhibitions and includes biographies of the members of Group 42.