Collecting and cultural environment in an "open" and in a "closed" space : case studies from Bohemia and Moravia
Abstract
The aim is to formulate and illustrate the thesis, that the existence of a major picture collection is an important visual deposit for where it is placed, and that it will affect the region, and that it depends upon whether it is installed in an "open" or in a "closed" space. The inner core thesis is the belief that collections and collecting will influence their particular cultural environments, as well as the work of local artists, in a major way as well as the work of local artists.
Let us have a look at two select examples of this, one in Bohemia, the other in Moravia. The first impulses for modern Czech art arrived with the first exhibition of Auguste Rodin's oeuvre outside France, which took place in Prague, in the Kinsky Garden.
Vincenc Kramář collected seminal works by Picasso, Braque, Derain, and other early Cubist Parisian painters, which heavily influenced and had a substantial effect on the development of Czech art. For the second case, let us move to bishop of Olomouc after the Thirty Years' War, Karl of Lichtenstein-Castelcorno, who acquired the colection of the top European standard including paintings collected by Franz and Berhard of Imstenraedt (Caravaggio, David - Vienna, Titian, Apollo and Marsyas - Kroměříž, Antonello da Messina, St Sebastian and Giorgione, Sleeping Venus - Dresden, Van Dyck, Charles I and his wife - Kroměříž, Sebastian del Piombo, Madonna with the Veil - Olomouc).
Also this brilliant collection had major effect on Central European art milieu. Two situations in different epochs: 1) the collection of dr.
Vincent Kramář after 1948 as a source of knowledge of French modern art for contemporary Czech artists and for Czech historians and art critics, as well as a source of inspiration for painters, poets and writers in the closed space of the totalitarian reality of the communist state. 2) the collection of the Prince-Bishop of Olomouc Charles of Lichtenstein-Castelcorno in an open Baroque society after the Thirty Years' War as a source of inspiration for artists of Central Europe, aristocratic collectors and the Baroque cultural public.