Museum Kampa

About

Museum Kampa is a private gallery founded in Prague on February 26, 1999, by Meda Mládková as the home of the Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation collection. The museum is located in the renovated former watermills in the center of Kampa Island. Since 2022, the permanent exhibition of the Kampa Museum collections has also been hosted at the castle in Moravský Krumlov, where Alfons Mucha's Slav Epic is on display until 2026. The museum also includes a multicultural center established in Werich villa. The Věra and Vladimír Janoušek Foundation, which manages the Vladimír and Věra Janoušek Sculpture Studio in Prague's Košíře district and a depository in Vidonice, has its office here and is closely linked to the museum in terms of personnel. In 2015, the British newspaper The Guardian ranked Museum Kampa among the five most interesting private museums in Europe.

Meda Mládková began building her collection of Czech art while living in the United States. Thanks to her personal friendship with František Kupka, she managed to assemble an extensive collection of his works. She also purchased a large collection of sculptures by Otto Gutfreund, which had been exported to the US by the socialist enterprise Art Centrum, when the original dealer in New York was unable to sell the sculptures and pay for them. During the normalization period, Meda Mládková continued purchasing of artworks by a number of Czech artists who were not allowed to exhibit at the time.

The core of the collection consists of 1,086 works of art by Czech and European artists, which were purchased over the years by Meda Mládková. In 2002, the private collection of works by Jiří Kolář and Běla Kolářová was acquired as a donation to the foundation. The collection of contemporary Czech art "In Honor of Jindřich Chalupecký" was originally created from donations by artists for the purchase of a hemodialysis machine for Jindřich Chalupecký. Thanks to the generosity of the manufacturer and the Charter 77 Foundation, which paid for the machine, the works were eventually transferred to the Kampa Museum Foundation. In 2007, Meda Mládková purchased a collection of Czech art assembled by Grit Wendelberger.

Watermills at this address probably existed from the Middle Ages as the property of the Benedictine monastery at Prague Castle and were documented from 1393. The wooden mill was burned down by the Hussites, and in 1478 the land passed from the ownership of the Old Town of Prague to Václav Sova of Liboslav, who built a hammer mill with a gristmill here. It was destroyed by a flood in 1501 and burned down in 1560. In 1574, the watermill returned to the ownership of the Old Town municipality, which built a stone Renaissance building here in 1589, of which the remains of the tower have been preserved. In 1641, the mill burned down again and was rebuilt during the Baroque period.

A major change was the classicist reconstruction in the 19th century, when the mill was owned by miller František Odkolek. At that time, the north wing and the luxurious residential part of the mill were also built. The neo-Gothic facade, designed by architect Josef Schulz, dates from after 1867. František Odkolek also built a single-story machine room with a chimney and enclosed the courtyard with horse stables. A polygonal tower was built in the courtyard, probably above the well, which was later used as a dovecote. In 1896, the mill burned down and returned to the ownership of the Prague municipality. In the following years, there were carpentry workshops here, and the Pinkas family lived in the residential wing for a short time. On the north side, a garden with a pool and fountain adjoined the mills.

In the post-war era, the building housed the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, the Zdeněk Nejedlý Library, and the Department of Theater Studies. The building, owned by the City of Prague, then stood empty for several years, and by the time Meda Mládková discovered it, it had fallen into such disrepair that it was in danger of collapsing. In 1999, a lease agreement was signed and reconstruction began, carried out by Studio 8000. The neo-Gothic appearance of the facade was preserved, and new elements designed by Václav Cigler, Marian Karel, and Dana Zámečníková (a glass cube on the staircase tower, glass footbridges, a water feature in the courtyard) were integrated after winning in an architectural competition. Meda Mládková had an apartment in a small house on the south side of the courtyard, where the ticket office and shop are located. Shortly after the completion of the construction work, Museum Kampa was damaged by the disastrous floods in 2002, which flooded the building. In the following years, the former stables were adapted for exhibition purposes.

The grand opening of Museum Kampa took place on September 8, 2003.

On July 15, 2020, a fire broke out in the museum. Due to non-compliance with safety regulations during welding, the paneling in the museum's technical facilities, where the air conditioning units are located, burned down. The fire was extinguished within two hours, but smoke penetrated the upper floors of the building and the depository.

The museum building and the embankment above the Vltava River are home to the Café restaurant Musea Kampa, and there is a summer theater stage in the courtyard.

Main building of Museum Kampa from the terrace

Václav Cigler, Meeting Place on the terrace (2009)

Meda Mládková proposed the establishment of a sculpture park in Kampa Island, but only some of the sculptures in the immediate vicinity of the buildings were realized from the original plan - the glass object "Cube" by Marian Karel, the "Babies" by David Černý, a sandstone sculpture by Miloslav Chlupáč, yellow penguins by the Cracking Art Group, a giant wooden chair by Magdalena Jetelová, reliefs by Viktor Karlík, and Titans by Emilie Beneš Brzezinski.

Cracking Art Group, 2008 - Yellow Penguins

The courtyard features a permanent installation of a glass and iron object entitled "Architecture 02-46" by Marian Karel, a reflective relief by Milan Dobeš, "Woman in the Sun" by Eva Kmentová, and sculptures by Aleš Veselý, Olbram Zoubek, Pavel Opočenský, and Michal Gabriel.

Marian Karel, Architecture, 02 --46, (2002)

The main building of the museum houses a permanent art installation of 17 bronze sculptures by Otto Gutfreund from the collection of Jan and Meda Mládek, as well as paintings and graphic prints by František Kupka. A chandelier made of bent glass rods by René Roubíček hangs in the interior staircase.

In the 1950s, Meda Mládková studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris and actively sought out František Kupka, who was virtually unknown in Paris and banned in Bohemia, at his studio, where she purchased the first painting for her collection. Thanks to her intuition and keen perception, she gradually acquired a significant collection of Kupka's paintings, which attests to the painter's importance as the founder of abstract art. The collection includes some of Kupka's first abstract paintings from 1911 to 1912, Amorpha - Warm Chromatics (exhibited in Paris at the Salon d'Automne in 1912) and a study for the painting Amorpha - Two-Color Fugue (the final version of the painting was purchased by the National Gallery in Prague from the Waldes Collection ), as well as color studies for the paintings Cosmic Spring and Stories of Pistils and Stamen, and early abstract paintings from 1912 to 1913, Cathedral and Marketplace. The painting Arrangement of Graphic Movements II (1912–1913) was donated by the Mládek couple to the National Gallery in Washington.

The collection is also exceptional because communist regime in Czechoslovakia rejected a generous offer from the artist's estate in the 1950s for political reasons. Meda Mládková then unsuccessfully appealed, together with Jaroslav Stránský, to the Czechoslovak exile community to acquire a collection of important Kupka paintings for a future free Czechoslovakia. The Mládek collection is thus the most comprehensive collection of Kupka's work in private ownership, alongside the now dispersed collection of Kupka's patron Jindřich Waldes. It was the exceptional quality of the collection that attracted attention when it was exhibited at the House of the Black Madonna in 1996, when the international significance of Kupka 's work had not yet been fully appreciated. The exhibition "František Kupka: Pioneer of Abstraction" was then repeated in a number of foreign galleries ( The Hague, Wolfsburg, Dallas, Ixelles ). The collection also includes a complete set of Kupka's woodcuts and numerous drawing studies for the cycle "Four Stories in Black and White". In 2011, Meda Mládková managed to purchase 44 paintings and drawings by František Kupka from the private collection of art historian and assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Lilli Lonngren Anders.

The Mládek couple followed the art scene in Czechoslovakia and noted in particular the new quality of many artists' work in the second half of the 1960s. Many of them cited the cubist works of Bohumil Kubišta and Otto Gutfreund as their source of inspiration. Gutfreund was little known abroad at the time, and the Mládek couple began systematically purchasing bronze casts of his plaster sculptures. With the help of friends in Prague and Gutfreund's niece Alena Novotná, they acquired a representative collection of his sculptures. At first, only visitors to their apartment could admire them, but later the sculptures Anxiety and Cubist Bust were exhibited on loan at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Meda Mládková wisely recognized the sculptor's contribution to the world avant-garde, and since the 1990s, she has always insisted on the simultaneous exhibition of Gutfreund 's Cubist sculptures when lending Kupka 's paintings to world galleries.

Collection of Czech and Central European Art