Czech Collector Dies at 102 – RisePEI

Meda Mládková, a collector who amassed a major grouping of labor by Czech artists, together with the famed modernist František Kupka, has died at 102. The Museum Kampa, an establishment in Prague that she based, posted about her passing on Tuesday on social media.

“Meda, though she lived a big a part of her lengthy life overseas, was all the time an awesome patriot and cherished the Czech nation,” the museum wrote. “When political circumstances allowed her to return to the nation, she contributed to the cultural improvement of the Czech Republic like few others.”

Born Marie Sokolová in 1919 in Zakupy, Czechoslovakia, Mládková spent a big a part of her life exterior her house nation. Previous to World Conflict II, she labored as a director at native brewery after which later for Škoda Auto. After the warfare, she moved to Geneva to review for a Ph.D. in economics. She was within the Swiss metropolis in 1948, when the Soviets assumed management of her house nation, and he or she remained exterior Czechoslovakia within the years after that.

Being primarily based exterior the nation, now often called Czechia, helped put her involved with among the artists with whom she established shut days. In Paris, Mládková turned pleasant with Kupka, a painter identified for his abstractions through which planes of colour seem like refracted by each other. Together with her husband Jan, an economist who died in 1989, Mladkova amassed greater than 200 work by Kupka, making her assortment of his artwork one of many deepest ones on the earth.

Mládková’s enthusiasm for Kupka ran deep. Based on the leaders of the Museum Kampa, Mládková as soon as even sold her home to purchase a Kupka portray known as Localization of Graphic Motifs II (1912/13). In 1984, she gave the portray to the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, D.C., the place it nonetheless resides at present.

Additionally included in her assortment have been round 240 works by Jiří Kolář, a poet who additionally crafted collages through which pictures of notable artworks are cut up aside by items of textual content, in addition to 17 sculptures by Otto Gutfreund, a Cubist who picked up sides of the motion whereas learning in Paris.

As lately as 2012, Mládková was nonetheless dividing her time between Washington, D.C., and Prague, the place she returned in 1989. In 2003, she opened the Museum Kampa.

The Czech politician Jiří Pospíšil, who serves because the museum’s board chairman, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, “All her life she believed within the concept: ‘If tradition survives, the nation will survive.’”