Krajiny umění. Švýcarský kritik William Ritter a střední Evropa (od roku 1888 do období po první světové válce) Landscapes of Art. The Swiss Critic William Ritter and Central Europe (From 1888 till the post-World War I period) Paysages de l’art. Le critique suisse William Ritter et l’Europe centrale (de 1888 à l’après Première Guerre mondiale) Cs En Fr

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William Ritter (born 3 May 1867 – died 19 March 1955), a Swiss critic, journalist, draftsman, tireless correspondent and diarist, was the first French-speaking author to systematically devote himself throughout his lifetime to the art of Central Europe, which he considered an interconnected whole. He was born in Neuchâtel. His mother (Joséphine Ducrest, originally from Bern) was Swiss, his father, a relatively well-known engineer and important art collector (Guillaume Ritter, originally from Soultz-près-Colmar in Alsace), was French. Having studied at the Jesuit lycée in Dôle in the French Jura Mountains and then at the grammar school and the Academy in Neuchâtel, William decided to take the Helvetic Confederation nationality at the age of twenty-one. He briefly stayed in Paris, where he joined the decadent environment, and despite his young age he began to “plan trips” to the East: to Bayreuth in 1886, then from 1888 to Prague and Vienna. A fan of Wagner, an enthusiast for neoidealist theories transposed into symbolist and impressionist aesthetics and their derivatives, Ritter was constantly exploring a world in which “the boundaries between life and dream” are disappearing through art. Very soon he learnt that the real territories where he could admire landscapes of the ideal world were located in Romania, Hungary, Montenegro, Albania, Bohemia, Moravia and the “Slovak county”. From 1893 he settled in Vienna and then from 1901 in Munich, with a two-year break (1903–1904), when he lived in Prague.Ritter wanted to become a writer, but Swiss, French and Belgian magazines made him primarily known as an art critic (especially of visual art and music) of the Central European countries. Unlike the first great French Slavists (Louis Léger, Ernest Denis and others), who tried to present, from the 1860s, a positivist and scientific picture of Central Europe to their francophone readers, Ritter subscribed to the older tradition of writers (Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, the Swiss Victor Tissot, the Frenchman Xavier Marmier), who considered Central Europe as a region for dreaming. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which for him was an area simultaneously familiar and exotic, Ritter, as a traveller and art lover, first received a friendly welcome by Serbian, Romanian or Czech French-speaking cultural élites. He established intimate relationships with the most famous local artists (in Prague these were Zdenka Braunerová and Miloš Jiránek, as well as Jaroslav Vrchlický, Svatopluk Čech, among others). From the first decade of the 20th century, however, he proved to be a conservative critic, and was therefore involved in many disputes. In 1914, he was in Munich when the First World War broke out, and he promptly returned to Switzerland. In the period of great changes after 1918, he remained faithful to the aesthetic demands of his “world of yesterday” and took on the role of its slightly pathetic advocate. Conveying the fin-de-siècle atmosphere in an original way, William Ritter was able to discover and appreciate many artists whose names are no longer familiar or have fallen into oblivion entirely. In the work, we introduce at least those mentioned by Ritter in the period following his first trip to Prague in 1888 until the First World War. Ritter’s extensive written and pictorial legacy is a valuable source of knowledge about the area which he called not “Central Europe”, but rather the “Orient” or “Slavic Orient”. He was also the author of novels set in Krakow or Bayreuth (Aegyptiacque, 1891). His second novel, Âmes blanches (Pure Souls, 1893), was to be part of an unfinished cycle in which “a dream was like life and life was like a dream.” Ritter remained faithful to this intention, i.e. the methodical study of the unity of life and dream, throughout his life. In line with the phenomenon which we call the “empathic syndrome”, his texts express, in addition to picturesque scenes and the re-use of his own critical articles, support for ethno-nationalist programmes (including antisemitism). In the sentimental novel Fillette slovaque (Slovak Girl, 1903), for example, he described the nationalistic friction in the Austro-Hungarian Empire taking place against the background of a motif from Hynais’ poster for the Czecho-Slovak Ethnographic Exhibition in 1895. However, much of Ritter’s work remained unpublished – novels, short stories, plays and even opera librettos, as well as three volumes of his biography amount to more than a thousand pages, which he dictated to his partner and collaborator Josef Červ; numerous “ego-documents” (diaries, notebooks, sketchbooks, agendas and calendars, photographs) and thousands of letters. As an amateur artist, Ritter had always dreamed of being appreciated for the artistic qualities of his work (drawings, watercolours, pastels and etchings). Some of these documents have been used in the present publication; they are kept in three Swiss archives (in Bern, Neuchâtel and La Chaux-de-Fonds), as well as in several Romanian, Slovak and Czech institutions.Ritter’s published work is very extensive, too – his critical studies on the fine arts, music and cultural history of Central Europe in general comprise more than five hundred articles in various journals, specialist fine art and music magazines, monographs and prefaces to fiction. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the art critic Ritter reported mainly on international and local exhibitions from Vienna, Prague and Munich; yet he also informed on regular salons, for example from Lviv and Bucharest. A very deep familiarity with the local cultural scenes was a prerequisite for such work, and Ritter clearly demonstrated that he had such knowledge. Markéta Theinhardtová (doplnit název článku + č. stránky) followed the chronological development of Ritter’s views in his fine art reports for major periodicals such as Gazette des Beaux-arts or L’Art et les Artistes. There he distinguished himself primarily as a contemporary art critic. He discussed old art sporadically, only when he wanted to document the “genealogy” of some contemporary artistic tendencies. In this respect, he followed the model of the art historian Richard Muther, especially his book History of Painting in the 19th Century (1893–1894), in which the author reflected on contemporary art from a historical perspective. If keywords for Ritter’s opinions were to be chosen, they would certainly include neoidealism and symbolism, as well as “national art”, both in terms of the genius loci aesthetics and in terms of the search for its ethnic cultural predispositions. Ritter’s changing attitude towards impressionism, like towards almost anything else in fact, was subject to his personal affinities. In principle, unlike interpretations based more on optical perception and artistic interpretation, he viewed it in terms of “moodiness” (i.e., for instance “moody landscape”) containing narrative psychological and historical elements. Ritter’s view of the work of the Romanian painter Nikolae Grigorescu, with whom he established personal ties, was based on this position. He created Grigorescu’s artistic profile of a “national painter”, an impressionist, the founder of the Romanian “national school”, whose work at the same time correlated with modern European tendencies. As a critic of contemporary art and a foreign correspondent, Ritter had the opportunity to set parameters for the evaluation of the art of Central European countries. His criteria were often in line with local cultural positions, but sometimes they conflicted with them. One example of such a contradiction is Ritter’s critique of the Prague exhibition of Edvard Munch’s work, organized in 1905 by the Mánes Association of Artists. The organizers viewed this exhibition as a breakthrough, indicating new possibilities of artistic expression. Ritter, as a supporter of Böcklin and the neoidealist movement, was put down as a conservative critic by representatives of Czech modernism (Miloš Jiránek) after a heated Böcklin-esque discussion (cf. Julius Meier-Graefe, who was one of the artists’ authorities around the Mánes Association and the Volné směry [Free Tendencies] magazine). This affair is quite characteristic of the time and reveals the intricate threads of changing paradigms. Ritter’s position as a Central European correspondent was significant; he influenced public opinion on artists within the international art scene and thus the demand on the modern art market, which was just beginning to take shape in Central Europe. It should be called to mind here that international exhibitions as well as those organised by associations at that time represented an opportunity to buy works of art. Ritter was certainly aware of his exclusive position and took the opportunity to shape the careers of artists on an international scale according to his own aesthetic beliefs. In the case of Czech artists, however, he was not very successful, although he convincingly presented many of them in his papers, such as the “true painter of the Moravian and Slovak people” Joža Uprka or Jan Preisler, whose work Ritter related, in accordance with Preisler’s position on the Czech scene, to the restoration of the “grand décor” and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He temporarily managed to establish the Polish painter Józef Mehoffer on the international art scene. However, Ritter’s praise proved to be so exaggerated that it eventually harmed the painter's reputation and caused their originally warm friendship to cool down. Nevertheless, we can say that discovering new talents and unknown or little-known names was a very important part of William Ritter’s personality. One of the most famous was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who later became famous as a modernist architect under the name Le Corbusier. Marie-Jeanne Dumont (“In the Footsteps of William Ritter – Le Corbusier and the Balkan Lesson”, p. ???) describes how the two men met in Munich in May 1910, how they very quickly became friends, how Ritter became Jeanneret’s confidant and also his teacher of literature who introduced him to the art of travelling. He even became his guide at the beginning of his journey from Vienna through the Balkan countries to Istanbul, about which Le Corbusier wrote the travelogue Voyage d’Orient (A Journey to the Orient). Ritter’s critical work on Central Europe was at its best from the turn of the century until World War I, but this publication deals with his work until the 1920s, when he established contact with Leoš Janáček. This relationship has been discussed by researcher Petra Kočová. In the introduction to her text (“Subcarpathian Michelangelino. Leoš Janáček and William Ritter”, p. ???) she demonstrates the importance of music in Ritter’s life. It had accompanied him since his childhood, when he played various instruments; at the age of fourteen he decided to study music seriously, attending concerts, writing music chronicles, and travelling to Bayreuth to learn about Wagner’s works. From 1888 he expanded his knowledge at the University of Vienna with lectures on the history of music with Eduard Hanslick and the basics of harmony with Anton Bruckner; he thus acquired good essentials for his future work as a music critic. Despite mixed feelings from his visit to Prague, Ritter’s first contact with the Czech environment in 1888 aroused his interest in the local culture and later brought him to the Czecho-Slovak Ethnographic Exhibition in 1895. As music was significantly represented in the individual sections of the exhibition, Ritter acquired quite complex initial information in this domain; he made very good use of it in his critical articles. He continued to supplement his knowledge constantly, became a correspondent for a number of periodicals (let us mention for example several years of his cooperation with Hudební revue [The Music Review]) and as early as during the first decades of the twentieth century he built up a noteworthy position for himself in Czech music circles. Ritter first mentioned the name of the composer Leoš Janáček in the early 1920s in a comprehensive text for one of the several volumes of the French Encyclopédie de la Musique et Dictionnaire du Conservatoire. He devoted a relatively large amount of space to the composer in the chapter on Czech music of the post-Smetana period, despite the fact that Janáček had only begun to become known shortly before that. Ritter himself did not accept Janáček’s work unconditionally at first, although he praised the composer’s original language and pointed out his unconventional way of composing. He still held this opinion at the Prague premiere of Káťa Kabanová in the autumn of 1922, where he met Janáček in person. Two years later, their contacts became more frequent; Ritter requested the composer to set two of his works to music, and although this project did not materialize, his interest in Janáček persisted. Before the first publication of the composer’s monograph in 1924, he himself considered writing one, as he felt an urgent need to promote the work of this artist who had long been unjustly neglected. The turning point came with the Glagolitic Mass, a key work of Janáček’s late period, when Ritter’s enthusiasm for Janáček culminated. Together they arranged a meeting in Hukvaldy to discuss Ritter’s plans concerning this new composition. However, the composer died a few days before the planned visit. William Ritter has long been one of the few reviewers of Central European music – both classical from the 19th century (he was the author of the first French monograph on Bedřich Smetana), and he also provided information about his contemporaries. Recently, his work has regained attention, especially in connection with artists who have become famous over time. An example is the Swiss musicologist Claude Meylan, who focused on William Ritter’s extraordinary relationship with Gustav Mahler. In Ritter’s view, Mahler was able to amalgamate numerous ethnic and cultural elements, which made him a “genius” of old Austria. He defended Mahler at a time when the Francophone audience was dismissive of him due to his Germanic origin. Last but not least, William Ritter’s œuvre also offers a rare testimony about the life of the gay subculture. Some of his companions and friends became his lovers. Ritter was an adherent of homosexuality in the ancient sense of the word, and in his relationships with young men he formed their sense of beauty, leading them to their own writing and artistic practice. For Ritter, traveling to Romania, Montenegro, Bohemia, Moravia and the “Slovak region” and living there also meant living homosexuality without taboos, as he had been taught by decadent writers, especially Pierre Loti and the eccentric Serbian prince Bojidar Karageorgevitch (Božidar Karađorđević). Ritter spent his entire life with young men and often managed to be happy in these relationships. Among all those who dazzled him, three men came to share a period of life with him: the Swiss Marcel Montandon, whom he met in Romania, the Slovak Janko Cádra and the Czech Josef Červ. The portraits and photographs of them that have been preserved in Ritter’s estate, also reflect his efforts to explore Central Europe.Xavier Galmiche – William Ritter a střední Evropa: „Sen jako život a život jako sen“Markéta Theinhardtová – William Ritter, ne/moderní kritik výtvarného umění střední EvropyMarie-Jeanne Dumontová – William Ritter a Le Corbusier: „Cesty do Orientu“Petra Kočová – Podkarpatský Michelangelino. Leoš Janáček a William Ritter