1923-2023 Centennial of the State Purchase of French Art / 1923-2023_Sté výročí státního nákupu francouzského umění
Abstrakt
This year marks one hundred years since the Czechoslovak government, under the auspices of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, made a substantial purchase of French art. It was the result of the longstanding interest of the Czech cultural scene in French fine art and the newly formed Central European nation and France at the level of official cultural and political diplomacy.
In this way, the state's art collections acquired several dozen paintings and sculptures by artists such as Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Eugène Delacroix, André Derain, Charles Despiau, Paul Gauguin, Aristide Maillol, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat and many other world-famous artists. This large purchase became the cornerstone for further acquisitions, which expanded the collection to include for example paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, and Maurice Vlaminck.
The Czechoslovak state's last pre-war acquisition was in 1937, when it purchased Paul Gauguin's Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin (1889). The entire collection was soon one of the best compilations of French art outside France.
This exceptional achievement shows how enlightened support on the part of the government plays a key role in relation to the acquisition policy of state cultural institutions. The international conference, organised by the National Gallery in Prague in collaboration with the Institute for Art History at the Charles University Faculty of Arts, aimed to explore this purchase from various angles.
In addition to trying to place it within the international context of the acquisitions of contemporary art made in the 1920s and 1930s for state or public collections in other European countries, it also critically evaluated the quality of the selected artworks, examined the influence that the presence of these artworks in Prague had on the Czech art scene, and traced their stories after they were purchased for the state collection.