Abstract
Totalitarian societies are usually regarded as being totally deprived of information about the situation in countries with an opposing political and social system. Nevertheless, even in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, including the first beginnings of the period of "normalisation", we can find a number of links with art in the Western world.
In addition to a few arts periodicals or publishing houses which occasionally managed to disseminate information about Western art, exhibitions of art from abroad were held to a limited extent, several prominent figures from the Western cultural scene visited the country, and on the other hand some Czechoslovak artists were allowed to hold exhibitions abroad or take advantage of different forms of scholarships to spend time in other countries. It is exhibitions of neo-figurative art from abroad (a neo-figurative period succeeded the previous abstract one on both sides of the Iron Curtain) which are the subject of this paper.
Exhibitions of work from abroad held in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s are significant not only from the point of view of presenting Western work, but also as an opportunity for contact with local work. The paper examines in detail, in particular, the Italian exhibition Premio Gaetano Marzotto 1967, which was held in the Wallenstein Riding School in Prague in the autumn of 1967, and also the exhibition The Disappearance and Reappearance of the Image: American Painting after 1945, which could be seen in the same exhibition premises two years later, in the summer of 1969.
The aim of the paper is to sketch out, by means of presenting these exhibitions, the level of awareness of Western art in communist Czechoslovakia, and thus to compare the return to the figurative in Czechoslovakia and in the West.