Hošek, Arne (Arnošt, 1885–1941).

[IMPORTANT, PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN WORK ON SYNAESTHESIA AND MUSICALISM – NO OTHER COPIES TRACED] O citu pro přítomnost [About a sense for the present].

[Prague]: self-published, [1940 or 1941?]. Square octavo (22.2 × 22.2 cm). Contemporary quarter-cloth over paper-covered boards; housed in protective card slipcase; 39 leaves of lithographed manuscript text to rectos on firm stock, with twenty-four drawings and musical notes in the text, and two original mounted photographs. Original bookbinder's ticket of V. Piller, Prague. Very good. Item #55570

This apparently unrecorded work appears to be a final summary of Hošek's own artistic practice and his extensive research on multisensory perception and synaesthetic equivalents in music, architecture, and the visual arts. The text was printed lithographically from the author's manuscript, presumably in a very small number of copies, and bound for private distribution, most likely shortly before the author's death during World War II.

Hošek (1885–1941) was an architect, urban planner, painter, art theoretician, and musicologist who developed an idiosyncratic version of synaesthesia studies. In his day job at the Ministry of Public Works, he concentrated on urban development and building acoustics. At the same time, Hošek participated in numerous international conventions, including four "Farbe-Ton-Forschung" congresses at the University of Hamburg (1925-1936), with his work appearing in the 1927 printed volume edited by Georg Anschütz. He participated in exhibitions at Lausanne (1932), Munich (1932), Leipzig (1932), Paris (1932, 1934, 1935, with "Les artistes musicalistes" of which he was a member), Prague (1934, 1935), Budapest (1936), and São Paulo (1938). Hošek's works appeared primarily in journals, such as Stavba, Magazin dp, Česká hudba, and Architektura.

His artworks were largely ignored in his native Czechoslovakia and he left no lenghy works or monographs, with this previously unknown late text a rare systematic attempt to summarize his views on multisensory perception in art and architecture. An obituary published the journal "Architektura" (1941, no. 3, pp. 257–258) notes: "As a deeply rooted musician and a cultivated, educated artist, he sought and found, through his life's work, the common laws of artistic creation and perception of music and visual art. He perceived and saw music spatially and colorfully, and visual art, especially architecture, musically. His thoughts and feelings were expressed equally through drawing, sculpture, architecture, and music; space, line, color, and tone. He was interested in the aesthetics and psychology of creation, the study of the physical laws of vibration, acoustics and optics, and the analysis of the creation of works of art. Hence the extraordinary diversity of his work, which is entirely directed towards synesthesia, the joint creation and perception of a work of art by combining all areas of art into a universal art, of which he was the earliest pioneer, theorist, and legislator."

In a unique style full of paradox, Hošek describes a kind of disenchantment predominant in the modern world, but nonetheless does not wish to return to "romanticism", which he sees as a "collective concept of passivity" and to which he juxtaposes his "sense for the present." Treating synaesthesia as an overarching aesthetic principle, Hošek develops an approach that correlates color, rhythm, and tonal structure. For instance, he describes the relationship between aesthetics and ethics as that between an architectural work and the "melody" which it embodies. In the example of a Gothic church, he describes it as a "melody suppressed by resignation" (p. 5). Hošek's work reflects the modernist ambition to overcome the separation of the senses, of distinct artistic periods, of different materials, and to conceive painting and architecture as a form of silent music, an aspiration he shared with contemporaries such as Kandinsky and the "Musicalists", such as František Kupka in the Czechoslovak Republic, Henry Valensi in France, and the Swiss painter Charles Blanc-Gatti. Hošek compares Beethoven to Michelangelo, Wagner to Donatello, and Dvořák to Ghirlandaio, finally arriving at Janáček as a musician whose work fuses poetry, visual art, and music within itself, and states that "The emotional value of absolute works of art is enhanced by the concentration of perceptions from different senses." He derives from this the importance of converting subjective aesthetic impressions from one sense to another, while acknowledging that this form of synaesthetic perception is rare and controversial, that not everyone agrees that "every sense has both a cognitive function and an emotional function."

The manuscript ends with the line "Completed in December 1940", referring either to the work itself or to this copy of the manuscript for lithographic reproduction. In all likelihood, the book was bound during or shortly after the war, based on the bindery ticket of V. Piller (the firm is recorded as existing in the 1930s, and would have been liquidated following the Communist takeover in 1948).

Altogether an important work of this relatively unknown and understudied figure. For an exception, see Lenka Pastyříková, "Vizualizace hudby v českém meziválečném výtvarném umění", Umění LII, 2004.

As of February 2026, not in KVK, OCLC. Not held by the Czech National Library.

Price: €4,500.00

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