On the Waves of Art | Collections of Czech Art

The collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Liberec is very rich, as is evidenced by the permanent exhibition collection of Czech 20th-century art. The chronologically arranged exhibition presents a cross-section of painting and sculpture from the past century.

Czech art of the 20th century engaged with international movements and styles, often with masterful brilliance. Visitors can admire, for example, the large painting Stromovka by Antonín Slavíček, in the early-century Impressionist style. The loose Impressionist brushwork can also be seen in the paintings of Václav Radimský and Antonín Hudeček.

The Cubist revolution in canvas representation is represented by the work of Bohumil Kubišta, whose painting The Kiss of Death was created during World War I. The adjacent sculpture Head by Otto Gutfreund expresses the same in space. Other representatives of this powerful movement of the 1910s and 1920s include the paintings of Antonín Procházka and Vincenc Beneš.

In the 1930s, surrealism and so-called imaginative art came to the forefront. Prominent representatives of this style, such as Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský, are also represented in our collections. Alongside them, we can find works by František Janoušek, František Muzika, and Zdeněk Sklenář.

The quality of his work during the Second World War was conditioned by the emergence of a young generation of artists who joined forces in occupied Prague and founded Group 42. This group is given its own space in our exhibition and visitors can admire paintings by Kamil Lhoták, Jan Smetana, František Hudeček and Bohumír Matal.

Post-war development brings new tendencies into art. On the one hand, artists fight for freedom of expression in contrast to the official rhetoric of socialist realism, while on the other hand, they refuse to have their private freedom taken away and create outside the official scene as they see fit. In the work of the emerging post-war generation, various forms of abstraction primarily develop.

During the 1950s, informal art became established in the Czech environment, which is conceptually linked to cosmological theories and the attempt to capture the indescribable ferment of the universe and the human soul. Works by Robert Pieson and Mikuláš Medek are examples of informal painting.

The constructive tendencies of the 1960s, which came as a response to the romanticism of Informel and which, through their geometric exploration of space, expressed the hope for a new rational world, are represented in the exhibition by works by Karel Malich, Radoslav Kratina, Jan Kubíček and Stanislav Kolíbal.

Alongside these two movements, non-abstract art also developed—not in the rigid canon of socialist realism, but as a new approach, only partially realistic, in the form of so-called New Figuration or New Realism. These paintings are based on reality but shift it both in representation and meaning, creating a world of its own, charged with symbols that are more or less encrypted. The permanent exhibition features paintings by František Ronovský and Michal Rittstein, as well as sculptures by Karel Nepraš, alongside works by the Válová sisters, Jitka and Květa, and Adriena Šimotová.

Because the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Liberec is constantly expanding, we also offer visitors acquisitions of contemporary artists from the past twenty years. Among them are works by František Skála, Petr Nikl, and Antonín Střížek.