ARTS-CZECH REPUBLIC: More Museum than Art

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Rocks

PRAGUE, Jan 9 1996 (IPS) - Entering Prague’s new Veletrzni Palac Art Museum, which took 10 years and 38 million dollar to build, visitors wonder whether they have come to the right place.

The museum’s entrance hall — called the Mala Dvorana, or Small Hall — soars eight stories up to skylights above. At every level, the hall is ringed by balconies. Every surface has been polished and shined. Every wall has been painted a gleaming white.

But there’s nothing in it. Not a painting, not a photograph, not a sculpture, not even a bench. And currently, there are no plans to put anything there.

“The architects specifically said that there should be no intrusion in the Mala Dvorana,” said Vaclav Erben, assistant director of the museum. “We’ve even been criticized for putting in things that we urgently need to run the building — the cloakroom, the bathrooms, the ticket booths.”

The ban on art in the museum’s largest space is just the final obstacle in a long line of stumbling blocks encountered on the museum’s decades-long path to completion. Along the way, museum officials have had to sidestep budgetary shortfalls, faulty planning, construction stoppages and a complete re-thinking of the building’s purpose and conception.

Today, however, once visitors negotiate the Mala Dvorana, find the coat check at the far end and, finally, the elevators leading to the actual museum space on the second, third and fourth floors, they are rewarded with some 700 pieces from the National Gallery’s modern art collections.

Gathered for the first time under one roof are the gallery’s Czech painting collection, with works from Frantisek Kubka, Jiri Kolar, Jozef Sima and dozens of others. The 15,000 square meters of exhibition space also house the gallery’s collections of 20th century European art and 19th and 20th century French art, including works by Picasso, Renoir and Cezanne.

“I think it’s important for Czech people to be able to see all of these collections together for the first time,” said Karel Srp, an art historian and curator for the Prague Municipal Museum. “In fact, they haven’t been seen at all in a long time.”

To be fair, the museum — including the entrance hall — looks pretty good.

Just empty. Indeed, the austere lines of the functionalist building provide one of Prague’s finest examples of early 20th- century architecture. The building, of which the name roughly translates as ‘Trade Fair Palace’, was completed in 1928 and used for expositions until 1949, when it became the headquarters for several foreign trade organisations. The exhibition halls were sectioned off and used for storage space and offices. (MORE)

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