Mucha-Museum s.r.o.

Tel.: +420 224 216 415
Fax.: +420 221 451 335

Info Telefon: +420 221 451 333
Besucher-Email: museum@mucha.cz
http://www.mucha.cz...

daily 10.00-18.00 h

The exhibiton gives an extensive overview of the artistic work of Alphonse Mucha (1860 - 1939). Special attention is paid to his time in Paris (1887-1904), internationally the most celebrated period of his work. A set of posters from this period is on show, including the most important made for Sarah Bernhardt. A set of his characteristic decorative panels and a number of examples from Documents Décoratifs (1902) give an idea of Mucha´s conception of Art Nouveau.

Pages from his Parisian sketchbooks, never exhibited before, can also be seen. Other decorative objects and three dimensional works including examples of decorated books can be found in the show cases. The work he created after his return to Czechoslovakia (1910-1939) forms a special group, consisting of posters, drawings and oil paintings. At the end of the exhibition we can see a suggestion of what Mucha´s studio in Paris must have looked like, with some of the original furniture, photos of his family and a set of photographs taken in the studio.

A half hour long documentary film about the life and work of the artist is also a part of the exhibition.

 

Museum of Communism (Private museum)

Info Telefon: +420 224 212 966
Besucher-Email: muzeum@muzeumkomunismu.cz
http://www.muzeumkomunismu.cz...

9.00 – 21.00 h including Holidays Except for the 24th of December.

The museum focuses on the totalitarian regime from the February coup in 1948 to its rapid collapse in November 1989. The theme of the Museum is "Communism- the Dream, the Reality, and the Nightmare" and visitors will be treated to a fully immersive experience. Immersive factories, a historical schoolroom, an Interrogation Room, or the video clips in our Television Time Machine are all part of the experience. The museum is a great introduction before you step back even further in time and experience the wonders of The Golden City.

This is the first museum in Prague (since the Velvet Revolution) exclusively devoted to a system established in the sphere of the former Soviet Union. The original items and meticulous installations containing authentic artefacts are displayed in the three main rooms (please see the virtual tour)

The Museum presents a vivid account of Communism, focusing generally on Czechoslovakia and particularly on Prague in a variety of areas, such as:

-daily life
-politics
-history
-sport
-economics
-education
-the „arts“ (such as the so-called Socialist Realism movement)
-media propaganda
-the Peoples’ Militias
-the army
-the police (including the dreaded secret STB apparatus)
-censorship
-judiciary and coercive institutions (including the Stalinist show-trials and political labour camps)

Highlights from the displays include rare items from the Museum’s own comprehensive archive as well as material obtained by the organisers from major collections, both public and private.

The Museum of Communism was created for the display and interpretation of objects and historic documents. It stands as an authoritative historical narrative relating to this 20th century phenomenon. It is, however, in no way intended by the organisers to be a filter for contemporary political issues in the Czech Republic.

 

Museum of Czech Cubism

http://www.ngprague.cz...

National Gallery

daily except Mondays from 10 till 18 h.

Transport: tram 5, 8, 14 station Námìstí Republiky;
metro A station Mùstek
metro B - station Námìstí Republik
MAPA

The exhibition has been prepared by the National Gallery in Prague, in collaboration with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and the National Museum, for the State Fund for Culture of the Czech Republic.

Exhibition designed by: Milan Knížák, Tomáš Vlèek

Architect: Stanislav Kolíbal

Curator: Tomáš Vlèek

Collaboration: Jana Horneková, Milan Hlaveš, Iva Janáková, Josef Kandert, Daniela Karasová, Katarína Müllerová, Olga Uhrová, Lucie Vlèková

The exhibits have been loaned by:
Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the National Gallery in Prague, Collection of Prints and Drawings of the National Gallery in Prague, National Museum – Historical Museum, Library of the National Museum, National Museum – the Náprstek Museum of Asian, African and American Cultures, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, National Museum of Technology – Archives of Architecture, Regional Gallery of the Czech-Moravian Highlands in Jihlava, Regional Gallery in Liberec, Benedikt Rejt Gallery in Louny, Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, Antikva Nova Kodl s r. o., Museum Velké Meziøíèí and private collectors

The museum is situated in the centre of Prague, in an outstanding piece of Cubist architecture by Josef Goèár, the Black Madonna House, at the point where Celetná St. meets Ovocný trh. The house dating from 1911–12, designed for František Josef Herbst as a department store with a café on the first floor, is an example of how a modern building can sensitively be incorporated in the historical core of the Old Town. The fact that after the recent reconstruction its spaces have been assigned to the Museum of Czech Cubism owes to a brilliant decision by the Ministry of Culture. The exhibition was arranged by the National Gallery in Prague in collaboration with the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and the National Museum.

The exhibition of Czech Cubism presented on the second and third floors of the Black Madonna House focuses on the years 1910–19, the most important stage of Cubism in the Czech lands. Painting is represented by the works of Emil Filla, Bohumil Kubišta, Vincenc Beneš, Josef Èapek, Antonín Procházka, Václav Špála, Jan Zrzavý, Otakar Nejedlý, and Otakar Kubín, while sculpture is the domain of Otto Gutfreund. The collection of paintings and sculptures was chosen from the holdings of the National Gallery in Prague and supplemented by a number of loans from galleries outside Prague and from private collectors. The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague loaned the various pieces of furniture made from designs of the architects Pavel Janák, Josef Goèár and Vlastislav Hofman. Their architectural works, along with documents of Josef Chochol’s works, are shown in a number of photos and two models: Goèár’s Black Madonna House and Chochol’s tenement house in Neklanova St. in Prague. It is the Czech Cubist architecture dating from the years before World War I that is quite unique and cannot be found anywhere else in Europe. Samples of applied art were also loaned by the Museum of Decorative Arts. The exhibited ceramic items were executed from the designs by Pavel Janák, Vlastislav Hofman and Jaroslav Horejc, while the glass was designed by Josef Rosipal and posters present the works of Jaroslav Benda, V. H. Brunner and Václav Špála.
Exhibits on the fourth floor include drawings and prints by all the earlier mentioned artists. In an interesting way, they are also complemented with items of African sculpture, whose simplified and succinctly expressed forms fascinated not only Emil Filla when he visited the Trocadéro in Paris in 1912, but also other Czech artists, and considerably influenced the forming of their Cubist views. The exhibited collection is rounded off with a number of documents, photos, reproductions of archival material and references to literature on Czech Cubism, which classified it within a wider context.

The Black Madonna House project counts on providing space for short-term exhibitions on the fifth floor, where also instruction programmes will take place. The instruction department of the National Gallery in Prague has prepared extensive accompanying programmes for schools and individuals.

A longer-term prospect also counts on reconstruction of Goèár’s interior of the café which had been abolished following the changed use of the former department store. The café will doubtless make a sought-after place of social encounters in the centre of the Old Town. (Jana Horneková)

Czech Cubism 1910–1919

Czech Cubism became one of the important movements in the development of art, design and architecture of Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The proponents of Czech Cubism born in the 1880s were able to use the creative ideas of their own cultural background, particularly of the Baroque, alongside the new inspiration found in European, mainly French modern art, and established Cubism as the most complex style of the modern times. The exhibition of Edvard Munch’s works, held in Prague in 1905, provided a key to the psychological nature of modern times. It was above all under the influence of Munch’s symbolical Expressionism and the French painting of the second half of the 19th century that the young Prague artists arrived at expressive painting as the starting point for their efforts to conceive of art in a new way.
For the first time, the would-be creators of Czech Cubism presented their own works in Prague at an exhibition of the Osma (Eight) group in 1907. In the years 1907–1910, the works of the painters Emil Filla, Bohumil Kubišta, Antonín Procházka, the sculptor Otto Gutfreund, and the architects Pavel Janák and Josef Goèár featured a number of motifs and presented questions, whose revolutionary solutions were made possible by their acquaintance with the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. From 1910, Czech Cubism was formed as the central tendency of modern art in the Czech lands. In 1911, the Cubist artists established the Group of Fine Artists, in the autumn of the same year, their Art Monthly magazine began to be published, while in early 1912, their first joint exhibition was organised. The framework, within which this Cubist generation worked, was formed by the influence of the Cubism in Paris, and also the ideas of the Central-European art historical knowledge. The members of the Group of Fine Artists included, besides the writers Karel Èapek and František Langr, also the art historians V. V. Štech and Antonín Matìjèek. Theoretical arguments for the generation’s inclination to Cubism were particularly provided by the pupil of the Viennese school of art history, Vincenc Kramáø, author of the first art-historical work on Cubism and the most important collector of the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso at the time. In the years 1910–1912 Cubism was developed as a style that in Prague, unlike in Paris, permeated all fields of fine arts. The stylistic expression was based on the perception of the surface and edge as the supporting elements of crystal shapes that provide the artist with an ability to understand and express the spiritual values of the world perceptible by senses. In this respect, the architect Pavel Janák went furthest, transferring Alois Riegel’s ideas concerning the artist’s wishes and vision into works in which the architectural design and the object of arts and crafts became artefacts equal to paintings or sculptures.

From 1912, opposing views started developing within Czech Cubism. While the architects and industrial designers continued in their efforts to create a uniform style, expressed in the morphology of the hermetic and analytical Cubism, the artists forming the core of the Cubism in painting and sculpture, Emil Filla and Otto Gutfreund, kept pace with the works of Picasso and Braque while looking for the new possibilities of this style. The result was a less confined model of art production, re-evaluating the hitherto emotionally-expressive tendency of Czech Cubism. Apart from their own theoretical activity, the key notion was Kramáø understands of Cubism as an attitude to reality that advocates plurality, in much the same way as the questions of time and space in modern natural sciences and psychology were tackled. Another factor was the response to the poetics of simultaneous images in the poetry of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, at that time translated into Czech by the brothers Karel and Josef Èapek.
After 1912 the Czech Cubists thus started sharing in the formation of the avant-garde art concepts. The decisive period was the years of World War I which marked Otto Gutfreund’s stay in France, took Emil Filla to Holland and Bohumil Kubišta to the war fields.

The experience of war accelerated and focused the relation of the Cubists to the idiom of their art expression and its anchoring in reality. In his paintings and collages featuring still lifes, Filla newly discovered everyday objects. With Josef Èapek, the complex problems of Cubism centred on the basic motifs of art production, the human figure, shape and structure. Gutfreund‘s sculptures revealed new possibilities of the impressive combination of the abstract structure and object sign. This was also the basis for the new development of architecture, particularly in the works of Bedøich Feuerstein, one of the younger representatives of the Cubist generation. (Tomáš Vlèek)

Applied Arts in the Museum of Czech Cubism

Established in 1912 at the initiative of Josef Goèár, Pavel Janák and Josef Chochol, the Prague Art Workshops were based on the new concept of art industry inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte and mainly designed for furniture production. Their aims were formulated in a programmatic proclamation: „...along with its prime purpose, furniture should not only comply with good taste..., but should also be taken as serious art of substantial contents...“ Experiments with shapes, search for inner dynamism and formative forces that tame the material pointed out the limiting arrangement of the prismatic articulation of the material and construction rules derived therefrom. Breaking the traditional „two-plane sets“, oblique planes and oblique angles, the essential elements of the Cubist morphology, have become the basic means of the dramatisation of expression.
In practice, this aim was carried out in ordinary material (oakwood) with inconspicuous monochrome adaptation which accentuated the singularity of the form. The exclusion of the right angle as the basic tectonic element resulted in ambitious forms that were very challenging to produce and suppressed functional views with the furniture consequently being often called „theoretical“. Furniture, glass and china were presented at the Cubist exhibitions alongside paintings, sculpture and architecture. Both in this symbiosis and in the installation itself based on a polygonal crystalline form, the Group exhibitions transformed the exhibition concept of that time.

The new morphology was soon also used in applied graphics, which shows both in the design of the press platform of the Group – the Art Monthly magazine – and in exhibition catalogues, posters, and other printed material, outstandingly exemplified in the works of V. H. Brunner, Jaroslav Benda, František Kysela, and Josef Èapek.

The rare unity of the artistic views reflected in architecture, applied arts and graphics expresses the extraordinary character of Cubism in Bohemia. Nowhere else did it appear as an original style in such a range and conceptual homogeneity.
(Written by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague)
 

Museum of the Capital City of Prague

Fax.: +420 224 214 306

Info Telefon: +420 224 223 696-8
Besucher-Email: muzeum@muzeumprahy.cz
http://www.muzeumprahy.cz...

Museum of the Capital Prague – Exhibition Rooms

Tel.: +420 224 816 772-3
Fax.: +420 224 816 773

Info Telefon: +420 606 859 951

Tues.-Sun. 9.00-l 8.00 h

Museum of the Prague Waterworks

Tel.: +420 221 095 111
Fax.: +420 224 220 590

Info Telefon: +420 272 172 344
Besucher-Email: info@pvk.cz
http://www.pvk.cz/show.asp?column=39...

A visit to the Museum of the Prague Waterworks can be arranged by calling the following telephone number: 272 172 344.

The Museum of the Prague Waterworks was first opened in 1952 in the basement rooms of the Central Building of the Prague Waterworks in Prague 1, Národní trída 13. The opening of the entire exhibition was preceded by two generations of waterworks. The basis for the museum were exhibits which had been used in the exhibition of the Prague Waterworks at the Jubilee Exhibition which took place in Prague in 1891, organised by Ing. Václav Feigl. When the exhibition ended the material was stored in a depository and the waterworks engineers of the time, headed by Ing. Josef Bubák, continued to collect further historical items connected with the waterworks. It was thanks to this activity that, at the exhibition held in Prague in 1937 by the association "Gas, Water and Health Technology", the waterworks display was by far the most extensive.

Interest in the collection of documents and artefacts did not weaken even in the following era. This activity reached its climax with the exhibition "600 Years of the Prague Water Network", held in 1948 in the building of the Management of the Waterworks of the Capital City of Prague on the Kampa in the Prague Lesser Town. This exhibition was extremely well received and it was therefore re-installed for half a year in the premises of the National Technical Museum in Prague on Letná.

When the Management of the Waterworks of the Capital City of Prague was allocated the building on Národní tøída in Prague 1 the basement rooms were adapted for a permanent exhibition of the Prague Waterworks. The adaptation was entrusted to architect Vratislav Majer and builder Frantisek Duda, the installation of the exhibition itself to Otta Müller. The opening ceremony for this exhibition took place on 26th June 1952 and was attended by the Primátor (Lord Mayor) of Prague. This is therefore the date we ascribe to the establishment of the Museum. The collections were, of course, constantly being supplemented and processed. The number of visitors from this country and abroad rose steadily. The basement premises gradually fell into disrepair and therefore it became necessary to arrange more dignified conditions for the installation of these unique collections.

In 1992 the general reconstruction began of the old water filtration plant in Podolí, a building designed by architect Antonín Engl in the twenties of the 20th century. In the free space which came into being as a result of the demolition of the old chemical system new premises were constructed for the new exhibition of the Museum of the Prague Waterworks. For the general designer, Hydroprojekt a.s. Praha, the project of the new interior was elaborated by a team of architects from the Czech Technical University (CVUT), Navrátil - Páv - Frýdecký. The construction work was carried out by IDOS Praha and its subcontractors. In March 1996 the entire construction of the interior was completed. The area for the exhibition is on two levels and has a total area of about 800 m2 with depositories and a lecture hall for around 40 visitors. The interior of the filtering plant is separated from the exhibition area by a glass wall and in this way visitors have an incredible view of Engl´s "cathedral" with its functioning filters. Wheelchair access means that handicapped visitors also have the opportunity to see over the exhibition.

At the end of 1995 the Management of the State Enterprise of the Prague Waterworks decided to install the museum collections in this newly established area. The scenario was elaborated by the Head of the Enterprise Archives and Museum, Jaroslav Jásek, in co-operation with the archivist, Magdalena Undasová, and photographer Jaroslav Benes. The architectural layout of the exhibition was designed with great sensitivity for the newly created interior by Ing. Arch. Martin Tröster, the graphic design was proposed by Academy Painter Jirí Hanzlík. The work of installing the exhibition was completed at the beginning of September 1997. The entire exhibition preserves the chronological divisions of the historical development of the Prague waterworks system right from the first private water pipes in the 12th century, through the Vltava waterworks of the Renaissance period, the waterworks projects at the end of the 19th century and up to the present system supplying the capital city of Prague with water. Exhibited for the first time is the original pumping mechanism from the Klatovy waterworks dating from 1830, water pipes from antiquity, part of the Prague Castle water pipes from the period of Rudolf II, etc. Three-dimensional objects are supplemented by copies of unique archive material not hitherto exhibited and a wealth of historical photographs.

Extremely valuable are the collections of types of water pipes, closing elements and other historical appliances and devices. Presented separately is a unique collection of water meters. The promoter of the Museum of the Prague Waterworks in Prague 4 - Podolí is the joint-stock company Prazské vodovody a kanalizace (The Prague Water Supply and Sewerage Company).

 

Museum of Wax Figures (Private Museum)

Fax.: +420 224 230 101

Info Telefon: +420 224 229 852
Besucher-Email: info@waxmuseumprague.cz
http://www.waxmuseumprague.cz...

Zdenek Kocík

DAILY: 9. 00 a.m. - 8.00 p.m.

Náprstek Museum - Department of Asian Cultures

Fax.: +420 222 221 418

Info Telefon: +420 224 497 519
Besucher-Email: asiat.npm@aconet.cz
http://www.aconet.cz/npm...

National Museum

Náprstek Museum - Department of Noneuropean Etnology

Fax.: +420 222 221 418

Info Telefon: +420 224 497 516
Besucher-Email: etno.npm@aconet.cz
http://www.aconet.cz/npm...

National Museum

Náprstek Museum - Department of Noneuropean Numismatics

Fax.: +420 222 221 418

Info Telefon: +420 224 497 530
Besucher-Email: num.npm@aconet.cz
http://www.aconet.cz/npm...

National Museum