Pavla Machalíková - Taťána Petrasová
Direct experiences from trips to America and mediated reports about the world there led to the formation of an image in the imagination of Central Europeans that was not necessarily real: it also included highly idealized or stereotyped attitudes. Encounters with new experiences, indigenous peoples, and an alien world led to the visualisation of America as a wild continent, and then as a land of unlimited technological progress and unsuspected life opportunities in both a positive and negative sense. The experiences of travellers, emigrants and visitors to America resonated in the visual arts and visual culture of the Czech lands in the context of the Habsburg Empire, as it did throughout Central Europe. The visualisation of an idealised and disappearing world of indigenous peoples, accompanied by presentations of collectors' artefacts and the people themselves, thus acquired a tinge of melancholy. This was sharply confronted with the fascination with modern life and the technological progress of Euro-American civilisation and its lifestyle, which often took on different visual forms.
Blurb: "A remarkable reassessment of
Central Europe's material culture which adds
layers of new knowledge and understanding
about the global and colonial entanglements
of the region's past."
Jonathan Singerton
The book is a revised and expanded version of the catalogue that was published in Czech on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at the West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen in 2025.
First edition in English, 106 pages, colour illustrations, Praha: Artefactum 2026
This publication is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
ISBN 978-80-53018-30-2
DOI https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/uuid/uuid:8b60795e-ba46-4ac4-ac0d-c02a35750a7c
Online publication is distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
