Prague, Aug 4 (CTK) – The National Gallery (NG) in Prague plans two exhibitions and newly installed displays of modern and postwar art in the Veletrzni Palace on the occasion of the anniversaries of the 1918 and 1968 events next year, NG director Jiri Fajt has told CTK.
Czechs will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the establishment of their independent state, Czechoslovakia, in 1918 as well as the 50th anniversary of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion in 1968 that crushed the Prague Spring reform movement in the country.
The NG’s main event will be The First Republic exhibition to map the artistic scene of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) and its centres, not only Prague but also others, including some Slovak and Ukrainian towns. It will highlight the plurality of nations in the society then.
The exhibition entitled 1968: With Human Face!!! will present visual culture and art experiments from the 1950s until 1980s with a special emphasis on the turbulent 1960s. It will offer works of art, theatre and period design as well as literature by the Prague Spring writers.
Both projects will be launched in the autumn of 2018. They will be accompanied by public lectures, workshops, discussions and film screenings.
The NG will also show photographs by Josef Koudelka, including his famous cycle Invasion, mapping the August 1968 occupation.
Fajt told CTK that he was negotiating with Koudelka, who had donated his cycle displayed at the 2013 biennial in Venice to the gallery, about further cooperation and possible donations.
Besides, the NG will borrow The Diaries of Jiri Kolar (1914-2002), Czech artist and poet living in Paris, from Nuremberg, on the occasion of the 1968 anniversary. The diaries have never been put on display in Prague yet.
The NG has received the highest subsidy of all subsidised organisations of the Culture Ministry, 37 million crowns, for the events marking the anniversaries in 2018.
The state will earmark 400 million crowns for all similar projects in memory of Czechoslovakia’s establishment and the 1968 Soviet invasion.
The first 88 million will be drawn this year. The Culture Ministry’s institutions alone will get more than 34 million of this sum. They prepare 66 out of the total of 172 projects.
The main project will be a Czech-Slovak exhibition the Czech part of which is organised by the National Museum. It will take place in its reconstructed historical building in Prague centre.
The NG also prepares a significant change in the presentation of its art collections from the interwar and postwar periods in the Veletrzni Palace. It houses art from the end of the 19th century until the present.
However, Fajt wants the exhibition of the early modern art to be completed by the works preceding it. Consequently, “the art of the long 19th century,” that is the period between the French Revolution till the beginning of WWI in 1914, will be presented there.
The NG will prepare the displays of the interwar and postwar art mainly from its own collections. However, it will have to agree an long-term loans from private collections for its display of contemporary art after the 1989 fall of communism that it also plans to alter.
Top-quality contemporary art is not sufficiently represented in the NG collections due to a long-time lack of funding, Fajt said.
($1=21.890 crowns)
