Source: NYT
7-10-13
Derek Sayer, a professor of history at Lancaster University, is the author, most recently, of “Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History.”PRAGUE — A MIDDLE-AGED man sits in a cafe, sipping absinthe, the newspaper before him untouched. He stares at a shapely young woman perched mysteriously on the corner of his table. Naked as Eve, she is a translucent green. A waiter hovers nearby. Painted in 1901, Viktor Oliva’s “Absinthe Drinker” hangs in the venerable Cafe Slavia, which opened in 1884 and was a redoubt of dissident artists, from Vaclav Havel to Jiri Kolar, during the Communist era. Its temptress seems a fitting muse for a city where the absurdities of the public realm have often encouraged a retreat into the alcoholic and the erotic.