Lubomír Konečný

Josef Krása: Jacob Burckhardt

This year marks three decades since the death of Josef Krása (9 August 1933–20 February 1985), a prominent Czech art historian. The anniversary was commemorated by an exhibition in the Window Gallery of the Institute of Art History in Prague, which showcased Krása’s life and work. It also offered more than one surprise, presenting Krása as a man who was active in athletics and skilled at drawing, brilliantly capturing objects of professional interest in his sketches. It is not well known that Josef Krása had a strong interest in the historiography and the methodology of art history. The fruits of this interest came out for the most part late in his life, during in the 1980s. It was in this period that he wrote the afterword to the Czech translations of important books by major international art historians such, as Lev Fyodorovich Zhegin, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich, and to Vincenc Kramář’s book On Paintings and Galleries (1983). He also wrote profiles of Kramář, Karel Chytil, and Jan Květ for the compendium ‘Chapters in Czech Art History’ (Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění, 1986). Recent work on organising Krása’s papers, which are archived in the Institute of Art History’s Department of Documentation, led to the discovery of several previously unpublished texts on methodology and historiography, which were presented at conferences but for various reasons were never published. One of them is titled ‘Some Criteria of Interpretation’ (Některá kriteria interpretace, 1981) and another ‘The Classical Tradition in Czech Art’ (Antické tradice v českém umění, 1982). Some writings fall into a special category devoted to prominent figures in cultural history, which include another study on Chytil, a paper titled ‘Notes on the Work of Konrad Burdach’ (Poznámky k dílu Konrada Burdacha), and the text published here on Jacob Burckhardt. The latter work may have been written in 1973 for what was likely a never realised series of lectures. The Institute of Art History plans to publish all these papers in a single volume.

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