The exhibition presents the famous First Republic Artěl

Prague - The effort to promote modern artistic thinking in the field of applied arts and the strive for the cultivation of residential culture and lifestyle characterized the Artěl cooperative. The exhibition dedicated to Artěl opens today at the Museum of Decorative Arts.
    The cooperative was established a hundred years ago and encompassed the stylistic trends of the entire first third of the 20th century. According to historians, Artěl was a phenomenon in the Czech context, akin to the Bauhaus movement in Germany.
    The exhibition is titled Art for Everyday Life 1908 to 1935 and presents preserved works and designs released under the famous brand. Original exhibits of drink services, home accessories, toys, jewelry, textiles, or interior designs come 60 percent from the museum's collections, enhanced by private collections.
    "Artěl is a phenomenon of an entire era of Czech design in the 20th century," said the exhibition's author and museum curator Jiří Fronek to journalists. Artěl was founded in Prague in 1908 by the emerging generation of artists and art theorists, including Pavel Janák, V. V. Štech, and bank clerk Alois Dyk.
    The name of the association, which in Russian means cooperative, but also sounds like a foreign term for art, was intended to express its intended character - an artistic association based on mutual guarantee, support, and profit-sharing.
    Stylistically, they initially responded to Vienna's secession, but soon, in a brief pre-war period, through the designs and theoretical work of Pavel Janák and Vlastislav Hoffman, Cubism gained significant traction. "That is what made Artěl famous; it was avant-garde creation in the true sense of the word," Fronek stated. From that period come numerous unique Cubist objects primarily realized in ceramics.
    After 1918, the association joined the efforts to create a Czech national style, which was to be a distinctive version of Art Deco. Even in the 1920s, however, the legacy of Cubist experiments remained attractive to Artěl, and, according to Fronek, elements of Rondocubism even appeared in the association's work earlier than in architecture - otherwise the main platform for Cubism in the Czech context.
    By the end of the 1920s, with the onset of the economic crisis, Artěl was losing momentum and disappeared in 1935. According to Fronek, after World War II, the cooperative was removed from the commercial register.
    Under the Artěl brand, an American company has been operating in the Czech market for several years, producing glass artifacts and collaborating with contemporary Czech authors. Although it refers to the famous brand of the same name on its website, it has no connection with the pre-war cooperative. The brand was available, and the company registered it.
    Replicas of items produced in Artěl have been made for over 15 years by the company Modernista, which also sells them at the Museum of Decorative Arts.