Read Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City for Free Online Page B

just when it seemed the madly rearing chair would tip him forward on to the floor, he would grasp the armrests and pitch himself stiffly back against the headrest and go suddenly still, queasily smiling, like Dr Strangelove in his wheelchair, pi nioned by a gravitational force all of his own. I made the first gaffe of the evening by asking how many rooms there were in the apartment. The Professor winced, and Marta in the galley turned from her steaming pots and gave a bitter snort of laughter; this room, it seemed, along with a tiny bathroom down the hall, was the extent of their living quarters. 'Our bed!' Marta said, pointing with a wooden spoon at the sofa where we were sitting. 'It unfolds,' the Professor corroborated helpfully, showing how with a graceful gesture of his hands. I am sure I was blushing.
    While Marta was noisily busy at the stove, the Professor conducted us on an imaginary tour through the city's museums we had been unable to visit in reality. His modestly delivered disquisition on Czech art in the twentieth century was a revelation, to me, anyway. Most of the artists he mentioned were ones, I am ashamed to say, that I had never heard of. The extraordinary flowering of Modernism in Prague in the years just before and after the First World War was put into the shade by brasher capitals such as Paris and Vienna. The long-lived exileKupka, who settled permanently in Paris in 1895, was one of the great figures of European abstraction. He derived many of his ideas from music - he liked to describe himself as a 'colour symphonist' - and photography, which he valued for its abstract possibilities. While Kupka was settling in Paris, the younger Prague painters were founding the Osma ('The Eight') group of avant-gar-dists, which in 1911 evolved into the Association of Plastic Arts, the cradle of Czech cubism. The greatest of the cubist artists was the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, although at the end of his career he abandoned the cube in favour of a kind of naive realism. The most tangible mark that cubism left on the city was in architecture. 8 As early as 1911 the architect Josef Chochol was putting up some remarkable buildings below the hill ofAfter the establishment of the Republic of Czechoslovakia at the end of hostilities in 1918 Prague became a sort of collection point for European avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, to which Praguers took with unsurprising enthusiasm. The city already had its own quasi-Dadaist movement, calledof which Charlie Chaplin was granted honorary membership in absentia. eventually imploded, but left a strong legacy in the Surrealist works of such artists as Josefand Jindf ich. . . Names, names. Listening to the Professor, I experienced a sense of shame such as a professional explorer would feel on being gently told that an entire civilisation had flourished briefly in the valley next to where he was born, the existence of which had been entirely unknown to him.
    Over dinner, crowded together at a small square table wedged into a corner of the apartment, we attempted to move from art to a discussion of the frosty state of East-West relations. Marta, however, would have none of it. She wanted only to hear about America, land of freedom and limitless wealth. She complained that her son, although a diligent letter writer, never gave her the kind of details she desired. Were the department stores as magnificent as she had heard? Macy's, Bloomingdale's, I. Magnum, Nie-man Marcus . . . each legendary name as she breathed it glowed like a coal. J. and G., disenchanted survivors of Berkeley 1968, tried to explain to her some of the realities of life in the Great Republic - there was much emphasis, I recall, on the plight of poor whites in the mining towns of Virginia - but she would have none of that, either, it was heresy to her ears. She was an educated woman, a chemist by training; she was not naive, and certainly not uninformed; she listened to the Voice of America and the BBC