Josef Hloucha (called Joe)

Largely known today as a preeminent Czech collector of Japanese art, Joe Hloucha had already amassed a collection of more than seven hundred objects by 1903, at the age of twenty-two. Exhibitions from his collection widely influenced the work of Czech contemporary artists.

Hloucha’s interest in collecting Asian art was sparked in Prague by his exposure to the Ethnographic Museum of Vojta Náprstek, one of the only institutions that exhibited Japanese art at the time. Hloucha was also an avid reader of travel books, through which he was exposed at a formative age to European travel accounts of Asia. Additionally, he followed news of Japanese military might in China, where the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 was instrumental in Japan’s emergence as a major world power. By his teens, he began acquiring Asian art from Prague antique shops.

Hloucha made his first trip to Japan in 1906, apparently abandoning his occasional clerical work to devote himself to travel and writing. He spent this trip primarily in Osaka and Kyoto, where he purchased books, toys, sumi-e paintings, Buddhist sculpture, ceramics, and porcelain. Shortly upon his return, Hloucha organized an exhibition of Japanese painting at the Topičův Salon in Prague in 1907. Contemporary reviews criticized the work as inferior while baldly professing total ignorance of the artists. Nonetheless, one critic, Karel B. Mádl, noted the marked influence of Japanese art in Europe, for example linking the long, vertical orientation of kakemono scroll paintings to European portraiture and citing Japanese paintings and woodblock prints as sources for contemporary Czech art, such as the work of The Eight (Osma) artist’s group. The following year, Hloucha and his brother Karel operated a Japanese teahouse at the Jubilee Industrial Exhibition at Prague’s Výstaviště fairground, which moved inside to the Lucerna Palace arcade in 1909, where it was open until 1924.

Hloucha’s collection of ukioy-e woodblock prints and his katagami paper stencils inspired Czech artist Otakar Štáfl, who illustrated Hloucha’s 1913 book Polibky smrti (The Kisses of Death). A woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada previously owned by Hloucha and now at the National Gallery in Prague (The Actor Nakamaru Tomijuro III as Sakeya musume Omiwa in Act III of the play, Imosegawa Onna Teikin, 1854) shows that Štáfl copied more or less directly from his Japanese source.

In the interwar period, Hloucha moved to a Japanese-style villa in the Prague suburb of Roztoky and furnished his home with such items as two bronze Chinese lions, Japanese lanterns, and a red bridge; he sold it in 1926, however, to raise funds for another trip abroad. That year he returned to Kyoto and also visited Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. He continued to publish books for adults and children inspired by his travels and produced one art monograph, on the artist Hokusai, first published in Czech in 1949 and translated into English in 1955.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hloucha and two other collectors of Asian art, the painter Vojtěch Chytil and former British customs officer Josef Martínek, put on a rapid succession of exhibitions comprising works from their own collections. In 1929 Hloucha organized the Výstava mimoevropského umění a uměleckého průmyslu (Exhibition of Non-European Art and Applied Art) at the newly built Trade Fair Palace in Prague with more than one thousand objects from Burma, Cameroon, China, Congo, Iran, Japan, Liberia, the Marquesas Islands, New Guinea, Nigeria, the Solomon Islands, Thailand, Tibet, and Togo. In 1935, paintings, sculptures, and graphic works by Emil Filla were exhibited together with African and Oceanic art from Hloucha’s holdings at the Mánes Gallery in Prague. Filla proposed the exhibition to Hloucha and also purchased eight works from him directly through the exhibition, seven of which were from Oceania. The display implicitly associated the work of Filla with the sculptures and masks from Hloucha’s collection.

Hloucha hoped to sell his collection to the young Czechoslovak state to serve as the foundation for a museum dedicated to non-European art. This was not to be, however, and Hloucha instead sold a portion of his collection, mainly African masks, at a 1930 auction in Berlin. The author Karel Čapek purchased several African objects from Hloucha, which continue to be held in a private collection.

A major collection of Japanese katagami paper stencils once held by Hloucha is now in the collection of the Náprstek Museum of Asian, African, and American Cultures. Forty works are now held by the National Gallery in Prague, with twenty additional items in the West Bohemian Museum in Plzeň. Much of the remaining collection was absorbed into the Náprstek Museum, formally known as the Náprstek Ethnographic Museum (now a branch of the National Museum), in 1956, during the Stalinist period. Nearly seven hundred volumes from his book collection, which include important examples of Japanese woodcuts, were ultimately acquired by the National Gallery.