Beschreibung:

ST. NICHOLAS AND HIS COMPANIONS
Description period: 1920; Bohemia (Artel) Lathe-turned wood, colorfully painted. Based on V. H. Brunner’s design for Artel. St. Nicholas box: 27 x 20 cm; Devil box: 20 x 20 cm; Angel box: 19 x 15 cm. Vratislav Hugo Brunner was a Czech type designer, illustrator, graphic designer, cartoonist, toy and stage designer and painter who played a major role in the development of Czech book design. In 1908 he co-founded Artel (with Jaroslav Benda Helena Johnová and Marie Teinitzerová). In 1919 he started teaching at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, where his student and later assistant was Josef Kaplicky. The name “Artel” is distantly connected to the late 19th century folk art revival movement in Tsarist Russia that was initiated by Princess Tenisheva and based in Talashkino, one of her villages near Moscow . In Bohemia, Artel represented one style in the national revival movement and one of many expressions of Central European Panslavism that had sprung from growing resistance to despised Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In fact, inspiration came from similar cooperatives that had been recently established in neighboring countries (Wiener Werkstätte in Austria, Werkbund in Germany) and European efforts to reform the applied arts, building on the British Arts & Crafts movement while advocating new ideas that were current in the “Kingdom of Bohemia”. Identical boxes in the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. Ref.: Fronek J., Artel, Prague 2009, pp. 146-147.