Politics of Beauty

“If art survives, the so too does the nation.” ~ Jan MladekDon Quixote: By Otto Gutfreund, Czech artist, 1911 Every aspect of life in Prague is political. It’s a concept that I as an American find somewhat hard to deal with mentally, but continues to stare me in the face. The Museum Kampa is an art museum for Central and Eastern European contemporary art. It was opened by Mrs. Mladek, the Czech wife of a banker who spent most of the time Czechoslovakia was a communist state in Washington D.C. Her husband did well for himself, and she amassed an extensive collection of art from her homeland and those surrounding it during the communist era, sometimes as the sole support for artists who were often targeted by the regime. In 2000, the old mill building currently housing her art was rebuilt and renovated as a gallery space and Mrs. Mladek donated her entire collection for the basis of Museum Kampa.

Every time I looked at a piece of art the day I visited the museum, I was forced to view it through the lens of this past. Often, this is not hard. For instance, one of the more striking pieces is a sculpture arrangement of women’s clothing, picked up by the artist after a demonstration in Poland and papier mached into their shapes as if these women were still standing in a group outside a government building. You are struck immediately by the way that these clothes, often severe, but sometimes elegant, and definitely feminine, tell the story of these women by their very emptiness. In a way it is saying, art lives, art remembers, art and culture cannot be shoved aside even under oppression. In another way it is saying, we are all dust. The emptiness calls to you almost as much as the clothing does. Art is politics, I know this from John Berger, I know this from John Lennon, I know this even from those anti-drug campaigns on television that are often surprisingly evocative.

But I don’t know this in the forefront of my mind every time I visit a museum. Here, I know it immediately. Even the pieces that aren’t blatantly political, such as the bust of Don Quixote I pictured above, a Spanish symbol, a literary symbol, are suddenly made to do with the Czech people and politics, and I found myself thinking that Otto Gutfreund’s version of Quixote was a wonderful, sad expression of the Czech sense of humor, a humor distilled in the last century when there was little to laugh about here. In the Museum Kampa, you know that he was collected by Mrs. Mladek, that these pieces were her own fight against the regime, even from far off D.C., and you know that it is a political act that she brought the art back to her people, put it in the heart of her capital city, crying out to the world, “Art has survived! The nation survives!”