Jaroslav Rössler and the Czech Avant-Garde

Abstract

While the names of some Czech photographers from the period between the World Wars, especially Frantisek Drtikol, Jaromir Funke and Josef Sudek, are generally known today, and their creative work has appeared in a series of publications and in many solo exhibitions, the work of Jaroslav Rossler is still awaiting proper appreciation and adequate publication. Although some of his photographs are included in the important photographic collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Folkwang Museum in Essen, and have also made their way as valued items into the photographic market at auctions of Christies and Sothebys, and in the offerings of various commercial galleries, no monograph on Rossler has yet been published. Apart from three small-scale exhibitions in his own country, Czechoslovakia1 and a shared exhibition in London in 1985,2 plans for an extensive retrospective exhibition in Prague have been constandy postponed, and his work is found only in a few magazine articles3 the unpublished thesis of Martin Stein from the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague,4 and several catalogues of Czech avant-garde art.5 However, Jaroslav Rossler was undoubtedly one of the most important representatives of avant-garde photography of the 1920s and 1930s. His work includes some of the most progressive and earliest examples of the application of abstract tendencies in creative photography, but has just as important a position in the field of constructivist or functionalist photography as in modern advertising photography or in poetic collage.