Nová věcnost nové ženy? : k genderovým aspektům moderních realismů v době první československé republiky

Recent research of modern realisms, including the New Objectivity, rehabilitated or even discovered many artists whose work did not fit into the dominant canon of modernism built on formal experiments, abstraction, and/ or iconoclasm. It is significant that the new realisms of the 1920s and 1930s included many women artists who considered radical avant-garde postulates too separated from life (and who were usually not welcome in avantgarde circles anyway). Analysing both the representation of femininity in inter-war visual culture and the work of several women artists who were either part of the inter-war Czech art scene (Milada Marešová, Vlasta Vostřebalová Fischerová) or were born in Bohemia but spent most of their professional lives in some neighbouring and in most cases German location (Erika Streit, Tina Bauer Pezellen), this text tries to find answers to some key questions connected with gender aspects of new realisms and the New Objectivity in particular: Why did women lean so frequently towards modern realisms? Did these fine art tendencies offer adequate means with which to express the long-suppressed and unreflected bodily and mental experiences of the 'second' sex and to find the personal and collective identity of women in modern society? Does a link exist between the New Objectivity and the ideal of a 'new' or 'civilised' woman that was one of the central icons of the 1920s? Can the gender perspective contribute to the gradual rehabilitation of figurative and realist tendencies in Czech inter-war modernism?