Fragile Harmony

An important part of the gallery’s collections consists of works by Austrian and Jewish-German artists. They were German primarily in the sense that German was their mother tongue, but they formed a natural and integral part of the region’s artistic life, and they often invited artists from elsewhere to visit the region. Their creative lives were closely connected with developments in Vienna, Munich and Berlin, and they were also involved in associations such as the Austrian Hagenbund, the Association of Visual Artists in Silesia, or the Ostrava-based Kunstring – an association of artists from the city’s German-speaking community, which held regular exhibitions at the House of Art between 1926 and 1943. These exhibitions took place alongside those organized by Czech and Moravian artists’ associations. This was a period of fragile harmony; the rise of German Nazism after 1933 violently severed these ties, and Jewish artists were eventually banned from exhibiting entirely.

Renata Skřebská