Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Second floor: Czech art 1930-2000
On the second floor, the section covering
Czech art 1930-2000
gives a pretty good intro-
ductiontothecountry'sartisticpeaksandtroughs.Firstoff,there'sawildkinetic-lightsculp-
ture by
Zdeněk Pešánek
, a world pioneer in the use of neon in art, who created a stir at the
1937 Paris Expo with a neon fountain. Devětsil, the most important avant-garde art move-
ment in the interwar republic, is represented by
Toyen
(Marie Čermínová) and her lifelong
companion
JindřichŠtyrský
,andbyabstractphotographicworks.Avant-gardephotography
featured strongly in Devětsil's portfolio, and there are several fine abstract works on display,
as well as some beautiful “colour tests” and graphics by Vojtěch Preissig, and a few short ex-
perimental films from the 1930s.
Fans of Communist kitsch should make their way to the small
socialist realism
section,
with works such as the wildly optimistic
We Produce More, We Live Better
and Eduard
Stavinoha's cartoon-like
Listening to the Speech of Klement Gottwald, Feb 21, 1948
. There's
a great model and drawing of a Tatra 603, the limo of choice for Party apparatchiks in the
1950s.Note,too,themodelofOtakarŠvec'snowdemolished
Stalinstatue
,
whichoncedom-
inated central Prague. Nearby is the allegorical
Large Meal
by Mikuláš Medek, who was
banned from exhibiting his works under the Communists. Opposite, there's a section on the
1958 Brussels Expo
, in which Czechoslovakia won several awards.
In the 1960s,
performance art
(
umění akce
) was big in Czechoslovakia, and it, too, has its
own section. Inevitably, it's difficult to recapture the original impact of some of the “happen-
ings”-thephotographsofMilanKnížakaskingpassers-bytocrowlacktheimmediacyofthe
moment. Other photos, such as those of Zorka Ságlová's
Laying out Nappies near Sudoměř
,
give you a fair idea of what you missed, and Vladimír Boudník's theory of “explosionalism”
would appeal to many small kids.
The gallery owns several works by
Jiří Kolář
- almost pronounced “collage” - who, coin-
cidentally,specializesincollagesofrandomwordsandreproductionsofotherpeople'spaint-
ings. The rest of the contemporary Czech art collection is interesting enough, if taken at a
canter.
Ivan Kafka
's phallic installation
Potent Impotency
should raise a smile, and there's
the occasional overtly political work such as
Great Dialogue
by Karel Nepraš, in which two
red figures lambast each other at close quarters with loudspeakers. It's also worth ventur-
ing out onto the balcony, where you'll find, among other things, models of a few of the
great landmarks of Czechoslovak Communist architecture and examples from the 1990s, a
set design by the innovative
Divadlo Drak
(a puppet company from Hradec Králové) from
1976 and some of
Josef Koudelka
's famous photographs from the 1968 invasion.
Third floor: nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art
On the third floor is the ever-popular
French art
collection, which features anyone of note
who hovered around Paris in the fifty years from 1880 onwards. The collection kicks off
