Books about art

Books about art represent the theoretical and critical, essayistic and columnist activities of Josef Čapek. For the first time, the volume includes in its entirety (both text and images) works on fine arts and culture that he published in books.
In his efforts to achieve an open perception of the forms and possibilities of artistic creation – art that is experienced internally and has character – the painter and writer Josef Čapek systematically devoted himself to the so-called marginal areas of art and their uniqueness. In addition to the immediate manifestations, simple and effective, anonymous and naive, crafts and modern technical equipment, new media, questions of taste, urban folklore, etc. studied and insightfully described the forms of primitive art, respectively. ethnic.
The collections The Humblest Art and Little About Much fall into the context of Čapek' s post-war journalistic activity, enriching the program with the theme of primitive creativity in the context of domestic and contemporary aesthetic discussion on functional, ethical and social aspects, especially in the concept of the living and vital relationship between art and reality. The amateur short story is a commented example of inartism in literature. The concept of lay (dilettante) art and the art of natural peoples (savages) are naturally and fruitfully internally interconnected in Čapek' s thinking. The book The Art of Native Peoples was and is not only a work of discovery and popularization in the history of fine arts and, in its time (not only in our country), a unique anthropological study, still underappreciated from this point of view, it is also a statement about the essence and principles of artistic perception and creativity, a personal confession. This volume also brings its preserved original versions.