In the Pompidou Center, there is an unexpected amount of Czech works

Paris - Thirty years after its establishment, the Pompidou Center is one of the most visited attractions in Paris and a veritable must-see for everyone coming to the French capital for its extraordinary art collections. Czech visitors should not miss it either. It hides an unexpected amount of works by Czech artists, although it is impossible to see them all at the same time.
    Of the approximately 58,000 works owned by the museum, over 700 are by more than a hundred artists who were born in former Czechoslovakia. The vast majority are Czechs, although you can also find Slovaks like Ľudovít Fulla, Július Koller, or Peter Župník. The list actually goes from classics like Jan Zrzavý, Jan Bauch, František Tichý, Toyen, or Josef Čapek, up to the younger generation. Photography is very strongly represented - Josef Sudek, František Drtikol, Jan Reich, Jan Saudek, and others.
    The mentioned count does not include the works of Czech artists whom France considers its own because they spent most of their lives there. This includes the painter Otakar Kubín, known to the French as Othon Coubine, who has over thirty works in the Pompidou Center, and especially one of the "fathers of abstraction," František Kupka. There are more than two hundred "Kupkas" from all periods of his work in this museum.
    Former long-time curator of the Pompidou Center, Jana Claverie, who comes from Czechoslovakia, considers Kupka's collection to be the most valuable thing in the museum regarding Czechs. She told ČTK that these works entered the museum thanks to the artist's wife, who, after his death (Kupka died in 1957), invited the head of the then National Museum of Modern Art, Bernard Dorival, to her studio and said he could choose whatever he wanted.
    The fact that the current Czech Republic is so richly represented in the museum is also significantly due to Jana Claverie, who made great efforts to ensure that the museum acquired works by Czech artists. "My colleagues often reproached me that there weren't as many things from other countries," she says.
    She recalls, among other things, the purchase of about 200 Czech works, mainly works on paper, between 1979 and 1981, "at a time when there was absolute darkness and a ban on exporting anything from Prague. But we brought it in legally through the Art Center, which was just in need of money and sold it to us, with the condition that we wouldn't exhibit it. We didn’t adhere to that - we exhibited it in 1985 and it led to a big international mess."
    Only a fraction of the Czech works is exhibited at any time, but this applies to the museum's collections in general. Out of the mentioned 58,000 items, the Pompidou Center can display just under 2,000 at once. Jana Claverie also points out that, for example, the works on paper she mentioned cannot be permanently exhibited at all. Therefore, it is usually necessary to wait for some thematic exhibition. In addition, the center loans about 3,000 works annually for exhibitions elsewhere.
    When asked how Parisians view the Center's building after thirty years, which is intentionally designed to look eternally under construction, Jana Claverie responds succinctly: "Well, they've gotten used to it." Some still say they will never set foot there. According to her, the aforementioned Toyen also held a similar opinion and refused to exhibit there. "We went to her, but she didn’t want to, saying the Centre Pompidou means nothing to her; she preferred the old museum in the Tokyu Palace, saying she would like to be exhibited there." Thus, visitors could view her works in the Pompidou Center only after her death in 1980.
    Jana Claverie is not particularly enthusiastic about the concept of her long-time workplace either. In terms of exhibition space, she believes the museum did not meet its original design because the upper floors, which are reserved for exhibitions, are entirely glassed, causing problems with lighting. This needed to be remedied by constructing internal walls and booths with artificial lighting.
    The newspaper Le Parisien, in an article marking the 30th anniversary of the center, also wrote that many still cannot stand the sight of the pipes, ventilation outlets, and other technical elements that the architects deliberately placed on the building's exterior. Le Monde then noted that this architecture remains "a prototype without any real continuation" and still likely faces prevailing conservatism today.