Dispossessing Art Collectors In Communist Czechoslovakia
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
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| Description | In the first decade after 1948 Communist coup d'état, private art collecting in Czechoslovakia experienced a great deal of ideologically motivated oppression. The targeted, systemic actions against so-called "former people" and other representatives of the "defeated" social classes, who had hitherto been the vehicles of this art collecting phenomenon, were taken. The persecution peaked in 1959 and 1960 by exemplary trials with eminent pre-war art collectors, former representatives of the bourgeoisie. This provoked the extensive new post-war wave of violent dispossessions of private artistic assets, the significant mobility of prominent and large art collections from private to public sphere in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The paper concerns several well documented cases of trials, resulting in the confiscation of property, the enrichment of the leading public collections and exemplary punishment and also cases of other "soft" ways of dispossessing individuals through the wide spread Czech institute of s. c. "legislatively forced gift". The violently realized collection transfers gave rise to completely new public art museums exposition outputs devoted not only to modern art in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s. |