‘Keep those kitsch away from the Czech hands!’ Ethnic cleansing in the light of provenance research: nobility furnishings on the post-WWII Czechoslovakia art market
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
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| Description | Significant social restructuring and radical ethnic cleansing in borderlands in the post-WWII Czechoslovakia was – among other – fundamentally evidenced by the contemporary art market. Massive state appropriations and transfers of furnishings from the mostly ex-German and ex-Hungarian nobility residences manifested themselves in huge wave of frenetic auction sales organized by the state bodies in inland centres, as well as in both official and unofficial antiquity exports. Although we usually miss the complex sources on these sales, the uniquely preserved archive material on the Auction House Ditrich in Brno enables us to reconstruct these processes in the extend of the whole Moravian and Silesian territory. The archive points out not only to individual noble families’ movable assets dislocated from the residences and traded, but it also serves as a basis for provenance research that can be conducted e. g. on the items subsequently eliminated for the state museums. For many of these rich post-war museum acquisitions are in these institutions up till now and yet treated as anonymous, without any individual historical memory left. The documents on the massive auctioning of confiscated, mostly ex-German nobility assets point out as well to period ethnic and social disputes that explicitly on the field of market arose between the sellers of confiscates and representatives of contemporary Czech living art. This multilevel nationally as well as clearly economically based conflict last but not least referred to essential diversities concerning the lifestyle and taste of expelled German nobility elites and parallel modern identity art focuses and expectations of Czech middle classes as potential receivers and buyers. With a certain licence, we could read such manifestations of resentment as a last chapter of the ambivalent historical process of dealing with the weakening aristocratic element in the age of modernism. |
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