Art and National Identity: Some Museums in Prague

EXHIBITIONS

Art and National Identity: Some Museums in PragueDAVID CARRIER

Abstract In histories of the art museum, Prague has only a minor place. Yet at one crucial early

moment, Prague played an important role in what we might call the prehistory of European public

museums. There is a close link between art museums and nationalism. One necessary condition for

being a country, it might be said, is that its people have a distinctive artistic tradition and therefore

reason to build a museum in which to house it. What, then, is the relationship between Prague’s art

museums and the identity of the Czech people?

If a nation’s culture survives, then sotoo does the nation. —Jan Mládek1

In histories of the art museum, Prague has only

a minor place. The city is mentioned only in

passing in Andrew McClellan’s very thorough

recent survey (2008). Yet at one crucial early

moment, Prague played an important role in

what we might call the prehistory of European

public museums. Rudolf II, Holy Roman

Emperor from 1576–1612 and the most impor-

tant collector of his age, amassed a major group

of contemporary and Renaissance paintings.

His obsessive art collecting is sometimes treated

by historians as a curious personal foible; he was

a famously neurotic personality. But as Thomas

Da Costa Kaufmann observes in his magisterial

history of art in central Europe, involvement

with the arts was a typical princely concern

(1995, Ch. 8). The artists of most interest to

Rudolf—painters like Bartholomeus Spranger,

Hans von Aachen, Giambologna, and Gius-

eppe Arcimboldo—are relatively marginal fig-

ures. But he also collected canonical older art,

such as the Venetian paintings of Tintoretto

and Veronese and Albrecht Durer’s The Feast of

the Rosary (1505), which he brought to Prague,

where it still remains.

Rudolf’s castle, which looms above Prague,

is now home to a number of museums. But after

his death, almost his entire collection was dis-

persed. The epigraph quotation from Jan

Mladek—which appears on the exterior wall of

the Museum Kampa in Prague—rightly notes

that there is a close link between art museums

and nationalism. One necessary condition for

being a country, it might be said, is that its peo-

ple have a distinctive artistic tradition and there-

fore reason to build a museum in which to house

it. This may be especially important for nations

which have not, until recently, enjoyed political

independence. Tiny Lithuania, whose capitol

Vilnus is far smaller and less important art-his-

torically than Prague, only became independent

in 1989, when it separated from the former

USSR. Yet it has a National Art Gallery devoted

to the history of Lithuanian art (Carrier 2008).

What, then, is the relationship between Prague’s

art museums and the identity of the Czech peo-

ple? In what ways is the survival of that culture,

as recorded in the museums and their collec-

tions, linked to the nation’s current identity?

David Carrier ([email protected]) has recently published books on the art museum and world art history.

With Joachim Pissarro, he is co-author of Wild Art: Art Outside the Art World (Phaidon, forthcoming).

227

Volume 55 Number 2 April 2012

McClellan tells us how the transformation

of the Louvre, the former king’s palace, into a

public space in 1793 led to the creation of muse-

ums in Germany, the United Kingdom, and

soon in almost every European capital. Today

that impulse has spread outside Europe: Ambi-

tious museums are being built by the dozens in

China, other parts of Asia, and the Middle East

(Carrier 2009b). Culture thus plays a major role

in defining the public sphere, even in countries

that are not democracies. Within the United

States, every large city has its own art museum

and often a Kunsthalle (non-collecting exhibi-

tion space) as well. One of the functions of such

museums is to show that you have an indige-

nous art tradition and the resources to display

it. This is one reason, I think, that we devote

serious public (and private) moneys to these

institutions.

That dynamic is more complicated in

Prague. Although the Czechs had a distinctive

language and culture, Czechoslovakia only

became a nation after the dissolution of the

Austro-Hungarian empire in the aftermath

of World War I. In the summer of 2011,

the Theresian Wing of the Old Royal

Palace at Prague Castle displayed a large collec-

tion of photographs from that war, 1914–

1918—scenes that had led to the creation of the

Czechoslovakia Republic.2 Less than 20 years

later, the country was invaded by the Germans,

only to be liberated but then controlled by the

Soviet Communists in 1945. The Czechs were

not fully in touch with the broader Western

world (or its art traditions) until just over two

decades ago.3 What, then, should we make of

Mladek’s insistence on the link between culture

and national identity? For the museum histo-

rian, the identity of a nation is analogous to that

of a person (Carrier 2006). Just as an child

matures into an adult, changing dramatically

but also maintaining a consistent, singular

identity, so an artistic culture develops but

keeps a kind of unity over time; and that unity,

more than any artist or masterpiece, is what is

presented and celebrated in the national muse-

ums. The Czech Republic has had a disrupted

political and cultural history, but now, looking

backward in time in its art museums, one can

see that history as all of a piece, from the period

before the nation was established to the period

in the twentieth-century when the country lost

its independence.

But there has to be more to the story than

what I saw this past summer in Prague’s muse-

ums. The ‘‘childhood’’ of Czech art cannot be

defined merely by Rudolf’s Old Master collec-

tions, for that Hapsburg ruler, who grew up in

Madrid and was first fascinated by the Italian

collections there, had a determinedly interna-

tional viewpoint. The artists he collected in

Prague did not think of themselves as Czech

painters. Perhaps, then, following Kaufmann,

we should speak of them as artists of Central

Europe; but that is much too large a geographic

unit to be identified with Czechoslovakia.

What about a linguistic definition? Rudolf him-

self spoke Czech but also many other languages.

But the identity of ‘‘Czech’’ cannot adequately

be defined by language, since the most famous

modernist writer who lived in Prague, Franz

Kafka, wrote in German. (During World War

II, his fellow Jews in Czechoslovakia were

exterminated, and after 1945 the ethnically

German population was expelled.) Even after

Czechoslovakia became fully independent upon

the demise of the Soviet Union, the story of its

identity is complicated. When Slovakia sepa-

rated peacefully from the Czech Republic in

1993, did that create a new nation or rather

establish more definitively the political identity

of one that existed already?

CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL

228 Exhibitions: Art and National Identity: Some Museums in Prague

THE MUSEUM VS. THE CHURCH

There is a tension in the visual arts between

seeing a painting or sculpture in self-sufficient

isolation, employing tunnel vision, and viewing

that work in relation to its context (Carrier

2009b). When art moves from churches to

museums, it has often been noted, it is seen

and interpreted differently. In a church, some-

times I light a candle and pray before the altar-

piece, which would be inappropriate behavior

in a museum. Often, guidebooks are needed

to sort out the history of artworks in such

church settings. In a museum, however, we typ-

ically see paintings and sculptures in a neutral

display, abstracted from their original context

and usually, in the larger public institutions,

hung in historical order. We all know that the

standard historical categories used by muse-

ums—Baroque, modernist, contemporary, and

so on—are ultimately arbitrary theoretical con-

structs, attempts (which are always subject to

revision) to identify the essences of certain peri-

ods. Yet these historicist ways of thinking can

inflect our experience of individual paintings in

illuminating ways. In St. George’s Convent, for

example, which was on my itinerary in Prague, I

found it useful to know that Frantisek Thadlik’s

Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist was

made in 1823 by a devout Catholic who wanted

to paint like Raphael (Blazickova-Horova

2009, 22).

We see in Prague’s museums a three-stage

history of Czech art. There are the old masters

of the old regime; the modernists of the nine-

teenth and early twentieth century; and the con-

temporary artists in the Kunsthalles. The first

and third of these periods, though, are essen-

tially international traditions, since the painting

and sculpture of the Northern Renaissance and

Baroque, like contemporary art, resisted con-

finement within geographic boundaries. Two

museums in the Prague Castle show the old

masters. Zd’ar nad Sazavou Castle presents

Renaissance and Baroque art, including some

collected by Rudolph. And the Sternberg Palace

includes religious icons, Italian masters of the

fourteenth and sixteenth century, Dutch paint-

ings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,

and Flemish paintings of the seventeenth cen-

tury—Rubens gets a magnificent high-walled

gallery on the top floor.

Prague also has two large, lively Kunsthal-

les. The Dox Center for Contemporary Art, an

easy cab ride from the tourist center, was show-

ing an important exhibition, Rudolf Steiner and

Contemporary Art, when I visited in the summer

of 2011. Steiner, a German ‘‘spiritual philoso-

pher’’ who invented biodynamic farming and

founded the international Waldorf education

movement, visited Prague repeatedly between

1906 and 1924 and influenced the early mod-

ernists Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and

their Swedish peer, Hilma af Klint. Steiner was

also an important influence on the thinking of

the most important post-World War II Ger-

man artist, Joseph Beuys, who is also in the Dox

show.

Closer to the city center, just across the

Charles Bridge from the Old City, the Museum

Kampa, marvelously situated on the Vltava

River in a reconstructed mill, was showing con-

temporary art in the galleries and sculpture

courtyard, along with an important historical

exhibition, Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka,

and Arnold Schoenberg: Abstraction and Atonality.

The multi-talented Schoenberg was an artist as

well as a composer, and his paintings nicely

complement his early expressionist master-

pieces, such as the opera Erwartung.

The old masters in the National Gallery

are not Czech, however that identity is under-

stood. Nor, on the whole, is there anything spe-

cifically Czech about the contemporary art


David Carrier 229

displayed in the Kunsthalles, even if some of the

artists are Czech. But two branches of the

National Gallery focus on the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, and there I did find

distinctively Czech art. St George’s Convent at

Prague Castle contains a large collection of

nineteenth-century Bohemian painting, sculp-

ture, and decorative art. These artists, who were

not known abroad, painted landscapes, por-

traits, and sacred scenes. By 1913 or so, artists

in Prague were able to see the Cubist paintings

of Braque and Picasso, thanks to prescient local

collectors. Local artists, and also architects and

decorative artists, responded. The Black

Madonna House, designed by Josef Goscar in

1912, now houses the Museum of Czech Cub-

ism, where this art is displayed in an authentic

setting. In these two museums, you see local

artists responding in distinctive ways to interna-

tional traditions.

The synagogues of Prague are not muse-

ums, of course, but these public spaces, grouped

near the center of the old town, tell an essential

part of the story of the arts in Prague. During

much of its post-Renaissance history, this rela-

tively tolerant city contained a thriving Jewish

community. Rudolf II supported the Jews in

part because of his fascination with the Kabba-

lah. The Jews were well integrated into Prague’s

economic life, but their synagogues were aes-

thetically exotic. With their magnificent all-

over decorations, showing no human forms,

their interiors look more closely akin to Turkish

mosques than to the nearby churches of Prague.

In the end, of course, assimilation failed

entirely, as the saddest display in Prague

reminds us: Children’s Drawings from Terezin,

1942–44, on display in the Pinkas Synagogue,

exhibits artworks by children deported to the

Terezin concentration camp, where they were

murdered. Now, although very few observant

Czech Jews remain, these large historical

memorials are handsomely renovated, a belated

acknowledgement of the Holocaust and also a

response to the history of hostility to religion

during the country’s Communist period.

Central Prague is heavily touristed, but

surprisingly few visitors enter the well-kept

museums, apart from those devoted to Jewish

culture. When I visited Kinsky Palace, which is

on the crowded Central Square and offers a

well-organized survey of world art history, there

were more guards than visitors. In the Castle,

similarly, most of the art galleries were largely

deserted. Perhaps the problem is that Prague

contains no new, large, architecturally distinc-

tive National Gallery. Or maybe the difficulty is

that, although the city has a great deal of art on

display, it can boast relatively few masterpieces.

On a more practical level, the problem may also

be that there is no full-scale accessible guide to

the museums. (The English-language websites

are useful.) It is a little surprising that the local

government is not more concerned about adver-

tising these institutions.

Still, if the disadvantage of the present

arrangement is that one must go to numerous

museums with overlapping collections in order

to get a sense of Prague’s artistic legacy, the

advantage is that you walk around a beautiful,

well preserved city, left mostly intact by World

War II and even, for the most part, by recent

developers. Just across the Charles Bridge from

the old town you can duck into the Church of

St. Nicholas, with its well-preserved Jesuit fres-

coes and sculptures. In the castle is St. Vitus

Cathedral, which contains St. John of Nepo-

muk Chapel with Fischer von Erlach’s great

early eighteenth-century Baroque tomb for

Bishop Jan Ocko (1380), the best work of art I

saw in Prague. Its silver angels holding a soaring

canopy are part of an installation that makes

Bernini’s Baroque Roman masterpieces look

restrained (Macdonald 2007, 151–152).



Exactly what role do these museums play

(or avoid) in the formation of national identity?

Here it is useful to compare some other, grander

collecting cultures. In England and the United

States, societies that until recently have had rel-

atively limited indigenous artistic traditions,

the major art museums have shown that these

countries are rich enough to gather and display

art from elsewhere. In France and Spain, by

contrast, the museums show that these nations

have lengthy, relatively self-sufficient artistic

traditions. And in Japan, art museums reveal

the long traditions of Japanese art while simul-

taneously reminding visitors that, in the 1980s,

the country was wealthy enough to also collect

modernist Western painting.

Compared with those countries, Czecho-

slovakia has very different artistic traditions and

of course a very different history. The art collec-

tions of Prague do not, in any literal way, nar-

rate this history. Some nineteenth-century

paintings in St. George’s Convent depict con-

temporary events, but mostly the modernist and

contemporary art does not. No art conspicu-

ously on display in these museums shows the

expulsion of the German minority after 1945,

for example, or the more recent division of

Czechoslovakia in 1993. And yet, as we have

seen, you cannot fully understand these art dis-

plays apart from knowing that history.

The historical and art-historical connec-

tions between the Austro-Hungarian empire of

Rudolf II, the democratic Czechoslovakia

founded in 1918, and the present day Czech

Republic may be complex. A long narrative is

needed to explain them. But just as the art of

Poussin and his seventeenth-century followers

has deep affinities with the modernist and

contemporary works in the public collections of

Paris, and those affinities justify speak of the tra-

dition of French painting, so the art in the vari-

ous Prague museums constitutes a

representation of Czechoslovakia’s national

identity. Mladek’s statement nicely identifies

the ways in which a country that has a distinctive

language, but until recently has had a precarious

political identity, needs its visual culture. END

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This essay is for Kristen Studioso, in thanks for

her company in Prague.

NOTES

1. See http://www.museumkampa.com/en/.

2. See http://praguemonitor.com/2011/04/29/

unique-wwi-photos-displayed-prague-castle.

3. Hobsbaum describes this history concisely and

illuminatingly.

REFERENCES

Blazickova-Horova, N. ed. 2009. Nineteenth-

century Art in Bohemia (1790-1910): Painting,

Sculpture, Decorative Arts. Prague: National

Gallery in Prague.

Carrier, D. 2006. Museum Skepticism: A History of

the Display of Art in Public Galleries. Durham:

Duke University Press.

———. 2008. Birds in European art: A very short

five-part history. Volla Nituania. Nomeda &

Gediminas Urbonas; Lithuanian Pavilion; 52nd

International Art Exhibition la Biennale di

Venezia, 26–35. Berlin: Sernberg Press.

———. 2009a. The poetics of the art museum.

Curator: The Museum Journal 52(3) (July):

221–228.

———. 2009b. Some museums in China, Macau,

and Taiwan. Curator: The Museum Journal

52(4) (October): 375–384.

Hobsbaum, E. 1996. The Age of Extremes: A

History of the World, 1914-1991. New York:

Vintage.

Kaufmann, T. DaC. 1995. Court, Cloister and City:

The Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450-

1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


David Carrier 231

MacDonald, D. 2007. Art for Travelers: Prague:

The Essential Guide to Viewing Art in Prague.

Northampton, MA: Interlink.

Marshall, P. 2007. The Mercurial Emperor: The

Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague.

London: Pimlico.

McClellan, A. 2008. The Art Museum from Boullee

to Bilbao. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

National Gallery in Prague. 2004. European Art

from Antiquity to the End of the Baroque: Guide

to the Exhibition of the Collection of Old Masters

of the National Gallery in Prague in Sternberg

Palace. Prague: National Gallery in Prague.

WEBSITES

National Gallery Prague and its exhibitions: http://

www.ngprague.cz/en/.

The Lithuanian Art Museum: http://www.ldm.lt/

VPG/Index_en.htm.

Dox and its Steiner show: http://www.dox.cz/en/

exhibition?49/about.

Museum Kampa: http://www.museumkampa.com/

en/Exhibitions-115.htm.



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Art and National Identity: Some Museums in Prague