Plzeň in memoriam honored the art historian who proposed to protect Loos' apartments

photo: Museum of the Capital City of Prague

Plzeň – Art historian Věra Běhalová was awarded the Seal of the City of Plzeň today posthumously. Běhalová explored and proposed for heritage protection the realizations of the pioneer of modern architecture, Adolf Loos, in Plzeň. The interiors, which survived until the 1960s, were practically saved from destruction, said Mayor Martin Baxa (ODS) to ČTK. The award was presented to the scientist's relatives.

"With the Historical Seal of the City of Plzeň, we honor those who have contributed to the development of our city, to the protection of its rights, or have helped its prestige. Věra Běhalová surely deserves a great deal of credit for all this, for thanks to her the Loos interiors in Plzeň were saved, of which we are now so proud. Had she not thoroughly documented them and had them declared a cultural monument, they would have been lost. She saved them from destruction,” summarized the mayor.

Běhalová was born on July 31, 1922, in Prostějov. Shortly after the communist coup in 1948, she was expelled from her studies in art history at Charles University because she got involved in the anti-communist resistance and passed secret messages from her university professors to the French ambassador. After being revealed, she was sentenced to seven years for espionage and treason along with others. In the 1950s, she was interned in labor camps and returned from prison with permanently compromised health. After serving her sentence, she had to switch between various second-rate jobs until the second half of the 1960s when she arrived in Plzeň to the Regional Centre for Heritage Care and Nature Protection.

"Here, for the first time since her studies, she was able to work in her field. Thanks to her strong will and immense enthusiasm, she became one of the leading experts on Loos's work," said Karel Zoch, head of the heritage department at the municipality. According to him, Běhalová earned the trust of witnesses who directed her to Adolf Loos's work in Plzeň. She began corresponding with Loos's former collaborators, clients, and friends. She set out to find what remained of Loos's realizations in Plzeň after the war. She documented everything and had it declared as cultural monuments. Many interiors were thus saved from destruction according to heritage experts, as Loos's work, like other monuments of modernist architecture, was perceived as bourgeois and worthless.

Mapping the Plzeň interiors by Věra Běhalová was a fundamental building block for their future study and restoration. She continued her research on the history of Loos's work in Plzeň after emigrating to Vienna in 1968. In Vienna, she completed her interrupted studies with a doctorate in art history and became a recognized expert in architecture and art of the 19th and 20th centuries. She died on January 6, 2010, in Vienna.