Life in Amplitude: Pathos, Passion and Thinking on Art and Aesthetics in Occupied Prague (1939–1945)

Abstract

The study is largely concerned with the topic of pathos, affect and the pathic quality in Czech thinking about art and aesthetics in the first half of the 1940s. Consideration of pathos is here, at the same time, a reconstruction of the relationship between aesthetic and art-historical thinking about art, a reconstruction of the affective/emotional experiencing of art and the attitude to aesthetics/ethics in occupied Prague during the war years, and of the pathos of resistance to violence even at the cost of suffering and sacrifice, as represented by the art historians and theorists Růžena Vacková (1901–1982) and Pavel Kropáček (1915–1943). The study sets out from the idea of the existence of a relationship between suffering and activity, practice and pathos, passivity and passion as active forces underpinning both actions and the making of art. The Second World War constitutes a highly specific cultural and social, mental, but also emotional and affective, ‘space’ in which man was faced with extreme states and experiences that were articulated in art in a variety of modes of depiction, but also duly reflected in the theory and philosophy of art. Here reflexions of pathos, monumentality and nobility come to the fore as aesthetic (or esthetico-psychological and philosophical) categories in the theory of art, along with a pathic history of art and pathic modus vivendi of not just artists, but also art theorists, and pathos as the icono-pathic force of works of art in general.

Keywords

• pathos
• artistic-aesthetic thinking
• occupation 1939–1945
• Růžena Vacková
• Paul Ludwig Landsberg
• Pavel Kropáček