A large exhibition of artwork by a Czech painter from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is on display in eastern Iowa, including one painting with a very storied history.
Stefanie Kohn, curator of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, says the untitled work from around 1917 by Joža Uprka details what’s known as kroj (pronounced CROY), a Moravian folk dress worn during the religious pilgrimage of St. Anthony’s.
“Kind of in the foreground is a young woman in Moravian kroj, kind of sitting on the grass, and then behind her, you can see the suggestion of hundreds of people also wearing folk dress,” Kohn says. “Many of his paintings of St. Anthony’s look like this. They’re very similar, mostly because people are wearing the same folk dress because they’re from a certain part of Moravia that he’s painting.”
When World War Two broke out, the painting was owned by Franz Gottlieb Schnabel, the owner of a cotton spinning and weaving business with textile mills in the former Czechoslovakia.
“During the Nazi occupation in 1942, the Nazis confiscated Schnabel’s business and personal assets, which happened to many Jewish business owners, so that included the painting,” Kohn says. “I don’t know his war story, but Schnabel did survive the war, and after the war ended in 1947, he filed an application and was trying to get a lot of his artwork back.”
The effort to see the artwork recovered took decades and outlived Schnabel, as the painting wasn’t returned to his family members until 2010 — nearly seven decades after the Nazis took it. It’s now part of collection of more than 120 Uprka paintings, all of which are on display at the Cedar Rapids institution.
“There’s some that are almost life-size, which is really quite stunning, and then a lot of in-between, and some small ones that maybe are only about as big as a piece of paper,” Kohn says. “He really had a vision when he’s painting these big scenes of the St. Anthony’s pilgrimage, then it’ll be a bigger canvas.”
Many of those impressionistic paintings that depict the pilgrimages are still vibrant in their reds, greens and blues.
“He was really fascinated with these headscarves that, in Moravia, these women wear this red headscarf, but it’s tied differently in each village and looks a little different,” Kohn says. “He was really interested in these headscarves and even wrote and illustrated books about these headscarves, so there’s a lot of smaller paintings that are just depicting those.”
The exhibit, “The Soul of Moravia: Joža Uprka Reprised,” is on display in Cedar Rapids through March 29th. There will be curator-guided tours of the exhibit this Saturday (March 7th) and on March 18th.
