Bohemian

Bohemia is a country that spent most of its history inside someone else's empire — Habsburg, then Czechoslovak — and its decorative arts record the arrangement. Prague was a workshop city for the imperial court, close enough to Dresden for porcelain and to Vienna for furniture, and confident enough to bend both toward a heavier, more sculptural version.

The aesthetic is material and virtuoso. Bohemian work is rarely about restraint: it is deep-cut glass, carved and gilded Baroque, hardstone, and later the faceted geometry of Czech Cubism. The through-line is craft skill treated as the point of the object rather than as a means to it.

Read it as a national argument carried in materials. The nineteenth-century revival and the Cubist moment were both attempts to make a design language that was specifically Czech — which is why the work is regional even when the forms are international.

The Baroque (17th–18th century) is the strongest layer: churches, altars and carved figures made for a re-Catholicised kingdom, at a scale that still defines Czech towns.

The National Revival (19th century) turns to folk ornament and to glass, establishing the crafts as a marker of identity.

Czech Cubism (1910–1925) is the modern answer — a short, small-output movement that took the region's geometry into furniture and ceramics.