Abstract
The article focuses on the discussion about fine arts in Czechoslovakia in the years 1945 - 1948. Not only according to some intellectuals, artists but also politicians the post-WWII Czechoslovak Republic could become a bridge between the West and the East, both politically and culturally.
However, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia then took initiative in the political and cultural sphere. The communist ideologists insisted that capitalism and the avant-garde art are already depleted, and have nothing to offer.
They postulated a radical turnaround and a completely new beginning of the development of Czechoslovak culture. The Czech artists were supposed to keep their distance from the culture of Western capitalism and build a new culture based on new social order.
The article based on archival sources, newspaper, art exhibition catalogues and books shows the struggle for artistic freedom, modern art and Western orientation of the Czechslovakia reflected in a public debate about the American and Soviet art exhibitions that took place in Spring 1947. Subsequent violent Stalinization of the cultural policy after February 1948 when the Communists seized the power in Czechoslovakia resulted in a strict rejection of the concept of the state as a bridge between the capitalist democracies of the West and the socialist Soviet Union in the East.