Under the restrictions imposed by the communist regime, assembling the photographic collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno was constrained within the very same limits that bound every Czech citizen at the time. The collection, established in 1962, was to be a showcase, a prestigious presentation of living Czech photographers whose works (though by no means all of them) were recognized as “art” according to totalitarian criteria.
Nevertheless, occasional osmosis occurred across the border
membranes; foreign photographs crept in to owners resident in
Czechoslovakia. The very first piece was, in 1972, a virtually
unknown and, sadly, damaged work by Werner Bischof, illustrating
poverty in post-war Germany: a mother breastfeeding a schoolchild.
Further foreign contributions arrived unexpectedly; the Chairman of
the Advisory Committee to the Moravian Gallery Photographic
Collection, collector Rudolf Skopec, was allowed to travel to the
USA, where he exchanged some photographs by Czech artists for
American ones. The gallery subsequently purchased photographs by
Lewis W. Hine and others from him. Unfortunately, Skopec died soon
afterwards. The existence of foreign works in a thematically
different collection called for some clarification as to how the
"foreign" items were to be used. Most important proved to be the
opportunity to acquire sample positives by famous photographers,
hitherto only known from books and exhibitions, of which just a
handful had made it to Czechoslovakia. Around 1980, we started to
write letters to those photographers whose addresses we had managed
to get hold of. As we could not pay them, we requested donations,
explaining that Czech photographers would like to know what foreign
photographers' originals looked like. The awareness that a
photograph is a unique piece of art that does not necessarily serve
as a template for a print was not common then, and the Moravian
Gallery was among the first art institutions to push this approach
forwards. The outcome of our efforts was poor. Bill Brandt sent a
photograph shortly before his death, and later Ralph Gibson. While
positives by American art nouveau photographers and pictorialists,
brought to his homeland by Drahomír J. Růžička in 1921, changed the
face of photography in the young Czechoslovak Republic, foreign
photographs from the second half of the last century hardly
differed from Czech ones. New horizons of the craft were only
revealed to Czech photographers through the American exhibitions of
Edward Weston and Group f.64. Further meagre acquisitions of
foreign photographs chiefly trickled over the border through
encounters with the artists, as donations or mediated purchases. A
prominent source of his own, and particularly foreign photographs,
was Hansgert K. Lambers, a photographer and publisher from West
Berlin and a regular visitor to Czechoslovakia. In chronological
terms, the final way of acquiring foreign photographs was
facilitated by Jindřich Štreit, who would exchange his work with
the photographers he met on his travels abroad, donating the
photographs thus acquired to the Moravian Gallery in Brno. In the
course of nearly forty years, the photographic collection of the
Moravian Gallery in Brno has been expanded and enhanced by work
from already-acknowledged photographers, as well as by those who
later achieved fame (David Goldblatt, Hans W. Mende). In addition,
it now contains quality snapshots by photographers who will
probably never become truly famous, or those who have abandoned
photography for other interests. Apart from cycles (some of them
miniature) conveying the gist of artists' objectives, there are
priceless single photographs (Walter Peterhans, Lotte Stam-Beese,
Raoul Ubac). Foreign photographic acquisitions do not make up a
comprehensive series, yet present a compelling sight for the lay
public, professional photographers and knowledgeable viewers alike.
The photographic collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno was not
designed to be international. Furthermore, international boundaries
are rapidly losing meaning today, in a situation resembling, rather
paradoxically, the Austro-Hungarian era. Photographs from the
beginning of the last century are only represented by a few
examples; however, a planned exhibition of photographs from the
period before 1918 will comprise works from all over the
world.
Magazín Fotografie
