A Cubist Mystery: Vincenc Kramář and Picasso’s 1913 Munich Retrospective

The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently launched its Digital Archives Initiative (DAI), a new project to make rare documents and archival materials related to modern art available online in partnership with institutions worldwide. Representatives of the Research Center will introduce this exciting new digital art history resource, and discuss the first archival collection made available through the DAI: a set of unpublished notes written by the Czech art historian and collector Vincenc Kramář.

Kramář played a central role in promoting Cubism in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1913 he visited Picasso’s first major exhibition outside France, at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich, and took detailed notes about the artworks on view, documenting his impressions in precise and poetic language. Written in Czech, and housed at the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Kramář’s notes have been largely inaccessible to Western scholars. Yet they hold the key to identifying many of the works included in the exhibition: information that has long been a mystery. Now, as a result of the Research Center’s international collaboration with the Institute, researchers can study an interactive reproduction of Kramář’s notes, a Czech transcription and English translation, as well as Kramář’s annotated copy of the exhibition catalogue.

This presentation will demonstrate the virtual environment of the DAI, modeled to mirror the experience of an archive, and discuss its significance for art historical scholarship on modern art.