Slovesné a výtvarné umění: Nezvalova Snídaně v trávě

The study deals with Czech art in the 1920s and 1930s and its relationship to theories of the Prague Linguistic Circle. It was during the years of poetism that the verbal and the visual arts interpenetrated. The intermingling of poetry with painting came naturally to V. Nezval, hence his poem Breakfast in the Grass (1929) demonstrates the poetist concept. The study discusses the interrelation of the poem and Manet's painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863). The poem is plotless, made up of a chain of free associations conveying a nostalgie view of a picnic. The relation of the two works is founded upon three pivotal areas: 1. on certain correlatives with formal characteristics of Manet's Déjeuner; 2. on references that can be seen as identifying Manet's painting; and 3. on the highly visual character of the poem and especially its scheme of color imagery which is related to that of the painting. The study concludes: Nezval’s pure association of clashing contrasts parallels Manet's associational painting in which there are also collage-like juxtapositions of rationally unexpected oppositions. Nezval was inspired by a French painting to support his quest for original forms. But it was more than simply intertextuality. It was that the spirit of Manet was 'in the air' in the Prague of the 1920s.