Abstract
Over the last few decades European and American art historical research has broached a number of topics related to occultism. These studies indicate that it is worthwhile to contemplate anew the impulses that occultism brought into art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and continues to provide even in the present day.
Within the context of modern Czech art we also find one extraordinary and heretofore not fully appreciated creative personality who reflected magic and mysticism with utmost originality in his works: printmaker and painter Josef Váchal (1884-1969). Váchal's artistic works were marginalized for a very long time mainly because they defy simple categorization.
Váchal did not participate in his generation's defining quest for a modern form of expression, for his individualism did not allow him to join in any kind of collective efforts. He ironically subverted and blasphemously mocked the values and ideals shared by artistic societies.
The affinity of his work with European modernism and the avant-garde was complex and ambiguous. Primitivizing archaisms came through very strongly, but Váchal did not adore the Gothic like the German Expressionists, El Greco like the Central European cubists, or African and Iberian art like the Spanish and French cubists.
He sought inspiration in the Baroque Counter-Reformation aesthetic. In Váchal's works from the 1920s and 1930s an artistic vocabulary of Futurism, Suprematism, Orphism and Expressionism can be clearly perceived, but a direct relationship to these modern trends is again merely illusory.
Váchal did not grow into an abstracted morphology in connection with modern Italian, Russian, French and German artists, but rather in parallel with them - because his work was reacting to the same sources of inspiration, among which the most important happened to be occultism.