Exiled Russian and Ukrainian Artists in Prague During the Interwar Period: The Case of the Collection of Jirí Karásek of Lvovice
Abstract
In the early 1920s, interwar Prague became one of the most important centers for exiles from prewar Russia. Thanks to official support from the Czechoslovak government, the émigré community was able to establish several important research institutions (most notably the Archaeological Institute of N.
P. Kondakov and both Russian and Ukrainian universities).
Czechoslovakia also became home to a significant number of visual artists: for some it was only temporary asylum before further emigration to Western countries, while others settled down and mostly assimilated with the local milieu. Contemporary research shows that many of the exile artists had an important impact on the local art scene.
Its art production did not (and does not) belong to the canon of the Czech art history, but shows how multilayered the cultural scene was. Apart from the art collections of the Slavic Institute and the Russian Cultural-Historical Museum in Zbraslav (situated in the suburbs of Prague) there was only one publicly accessible collection that focused particularly on the art of the exile community.
The poet and collector Jiří Karásek of Lvovice with his concept of a Slavic gallery made the art of artists exiled from Russia a significant part of his collection and also organized several short-term exhibitions of Russian artists, who had settled in Prague. This paper tries to answer the question about the role exile artists played in the local art scene, and specifically in the Slavic Gallery of Jiří Karásek of Lvovice.