Becoming modern: The Prague Eight and modern art, 1900--1910

This dissertation investigates the process by which artists in Prague in the first decade of the twentieth century transformed themselves and their art as modern, and the varied artistic and critical practices that underpinned this transformation. It focuses on the group of young Prague painters Osma, or Die Acht: "The Eight." Formed in 1905 and existing as an entity through 1910, the Eight definitively altered the artistic landscape of Prague. They transformed an art that was perceived to be tradition-bound and academic into one that critics would immediately hail for its modernism: the city's first "modern" art.;Born in the early- and mid-1880s to Czech, Jewish, and Bohemian-German parentage, the Eight met and trained at the imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. They came together on the basis of their collective resistance to the school's doctrinaire curriculum and their shared ambition to expand and diversify the scope of their artistic practice, and soon developed in their paintings new techniques, forms, and subjects of their own. In 1907 they first made this art public with an independent Prague exhibition. Other exhibitions followed from 1908 to 1910, as did continued artistic innovation and an ambitious artist-driven program of travel, study, and reading that brought the Eight into contact with the practices and ideas of other artists from Prague and abroad, some contemporary and some no longer living, particularly in France and Germany.;My study follows the formation of the Eight from their earliest training in art, through their relations with the Academy of Fine Arts and other established Prague institutions, to their exhibitory work and rapprochement with the public and artists in Prague and in other parts of Europe. It investigates also how critics and audiences, both positively and negatively inclined, sought to come to terms with the emerging modernist ideals that the Eight advanced: their high degree of artistic independence and experimentation, openness to the art of other cultures and eras, and the group's heterogeneous ethnic makeup, which did not mesh easily with Austro-Hungarian late imperial national politics.