Marie Jirásková

It's more like a biographical encyclopedia than an a monograph on the "visual style of Czech family puppet theaters, theater clubs and art scenes in the early 20th century as a unique reflection of avant-garde and modernist currents by Czech artists." In other words, the different chapters could have been better linked together. Other complaint is that some of the most interesting illustrations were way too small!, and captions should have indicated the size of the puppets.All that said, I enjoyed this book, and probably there's nothing else like it in the English language. The lathed puppets interested me the least--they tend to look like Christmas ornaments, at least in the photographs published here. I thought the book would treat more extensively the development of a modernist, aesthetic theory of marionette theater, but it comes up short.… (meer)