Supported Publications

Utopien und Konflikte (Utopias and Conflicts)

Utopias and Conflicts is a collection of 40 programmatic and theoretical texts on Czech art in the post-war period. This chronology of Czech visual arts is an excerpt from the book Czech Art 1939-1989, Programmes, Critical Texts, Documents, which in its original Czech version contains more than 120 texts from these years.

 

This collection of texts examines the development of Czech visual arts between 1939 and 1989. In addition to papers documenting the changes that have taken place in art over the decades, it also features significant culture policy documents such as The Two Thousand Words from the year 1968. It includes comments by prominent Czech cultural figures such as Karel Teige and Václav Havel. You can also read up on the official positions of Czech art under the banner of socialist realism. Czech culture in the second half of the 20th century was strongly characterised by the key problems in politics, society and art that had been formulated in the 1930s. In particular, the rise of fascism in Germany and the related fear of a new World War greatly influenced the cultural-political situation in Czechoslovakia. There were calls for the establishment of a united antifascist front to defend existing cultural values. Although initially accepted by the Communist Party, the avant-garde later increasingly came into conflict with state cultural policy.