Under this funding, we will embark on an ambitious research collaboration to rethink the academic approach to and understanding of modernism in Bohemia, ultimately – we hope – comparable and complementary to the work achieved by the authors of A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries (Brill, 2012). Like them, and researchers in other perceived ‘peripheral’ modernisms, we consider inadequate the prevailing perception of a small number of true ‘centres’ of modernism (notably Paris) surrounded by epigones, which reflects outdated hierarchical models of European culture and, when perpetuated in the Czech context at least, a desire to be seen to conform to an international narrative. Instead, like Marie Rakušanová, who critiques this othering of non-Western European peripheries in art history in her ground-breaking study of the Czech Cubist, Bohumil Kubišta (1884-1918), and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, in Les avantgardes artistiques 1848-1945, we shall favour a cultural-historical approach that combines examination of how modernism is shaped by local social, political, economic and cultural contexts with archive-led study of transnational interactions and networks not only with the perceived centre, but with other peripheries like Scandinavia, Belgium or regional Germany, which have been marginal to research to date.
