The Moravian Gallery in Brno is an art institution whose collections contain more than 200 thousand objects and are also accessible online.
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The Moravian Gallery in Brno is an art gallery and museum. According to its own description, its collections contain more than 200 thousand works of art of various kinds, and it makes them available to the public through an online catalogue.[1]
Collections of old art and 19th-century art
The collections of old art and 19th-century art have developed continuously since 1917 within the picture gallery of Františkov, later of the Moravské zemské muzeum in Brno. Among the oldest and most valuable acquisitions is Peter Paul Rubens's painting Head of Medusa.[1] In the 1930s and 1940s, under the medievalist Albert Kutal, a set of medieval monuments was assembled, for example works by the Master of the Rajhrad Altar.[1]
From the early modern period the gallery lists a set of late Baroque authors from the circle of the Vienna Academy, among them Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Josef Winterhalder the Younger and Ondřej Schweigl. The 19th-century collection reflects the proximity of Vienna: besides artists active in Bohemia and Moravia, for example Antonín Machek, Josef Führich, Josef Mánes, Julius Mařák, Antonín Chittussi, Antonín Slavíček, Joža Uprka or Alois Kalvoda, it contains works by the Viennese artists Friedrich von Amerling, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Hans Makart.[1]
The collection of drawings and prints was digitised and published with financial support from the European Union from the National Recovery Plan and the Ministry of Culture, within the Digitalizace KKS initiative.[1]
Collections of modern and contemporary art
The collection of modern art came into being in parallel with the creation of the works themselves, as early as the beginning of the 20th century. The acquisition of Czech modern art was begun systematically by Jaroslav Helfert, the first director of the museum of the time. At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s Albert Kutal took part in shaping the set of modern Czech art. Significant additions from that time are Players and Prometheus by Antonín Procházka and works by Emil Filla, Josef Šíma or Jaroslav Král.[1]
The collection received its most significant expansion after 1945, and its exhibits were first shown in a permanent exhibition in 1970. The interwar avant-garde is represented by works of Czech Poetism and Artificialism, the 1940s by works reacting to the war and by the work of Group 42 and Group Ra. Czech Informel is represented by works by Mikuláš Medek, Robert Piesen, Josef Istler and others. For the second half of the 20th century, those listed include Adriena Šimotová, Jiří John, Václav Boštík, Jiří Kolář, Michael Rittstein and the Brno artists Dalibor Chatrný and Miroslav Štolfa.[1]
Archive and the Jiří Valoch collection
The Jiří Valoch collection has so far been presented most fully as part of the permanent exhibition ART IS HERE: New Art, which presents the local art scene in an international context. The core of the collection consists of artistic tendencies that established themselves on the Czech and international scene from the beginning of the 1960s.[1]