Czech Republic Guide
South Moravia
Moravská galerie
Opening time: Wed– Sun 10am–6pm, Thurs until 7pm
Website: www.moravska-galerie.cz
Price: 80Kč
Brno's Moravská galerie has one of the best art collections in the country, spread out over three premises. Probably the most universally appealing is the applied art collection in the Uměleckoprůmyslové muzeum or UPM, on Husova, which forms the western limit of the old town. The richly decorated ground floor plays host to wacky installations and temporary exhibitions of anything from avant-garde photomontages to the work of the local art school. The gallery's imaginatively designed permanent applied arts collection starts on the first floor, and continues on the top floor, with captions in Czech and English throughout.
The museum begins with a room devoted to medieval craftsmanship, the centrepiece of which is a wonderful silver-gilt crozier from the 1330s belonging to the abbots of Rajhrad. The highlight of the Renaissance room is an incredible seventeenth-century Swiss ceramic stove with matching seta, all smothered in pictorial depictions of the months of the year. After a room of Baroque and Rococo glassware, snuff boxes, fans and pocket watches, and the simple, almost modernist lines of the Biedermeier or Empire period, you reach a whole selection of Thonet furniture. Thonet, whose factories were mostly located in Moravia, fitted out the fin-de-siècle cafés of the Habsburg Empire with their bentwood chairs and tables. The Art Nouveau or Secession section is particularly rewarding, with a vast, curvaceous Gaillard sideboard, iridescent Lötz glassware from Klašterský Mlýn and a Klimt clay jardinière.
Further up Husova is the Moravská galerie's Pražákův palác, another sturdy nineteenth-century edifice, designed by Theophil Hansen and now housing an excellent permanent collection of twentieth-century Czech art. The pictures are rehung every year or so, but you're bound to see at least some of the gallery's best works, which include sculptures by Bílek, Štursa and Gutfreund; early Cubist works by Kubišta and Procházka, plus later pieces by Josef Čapek and Šíma; black-and-white photographs by Sudek and others; political works by Nepraš; and abstracts by Mikuláš Medek.
The third Moravská galerie building is the Místodržitelský palác, the former residence of the governor of Moravia, originally built as an Augustinian monastery at the eastern end of Joštova. Under the Communists it served as a museum of the working class, but it now hosts temporary exhibitions, plus a small permanent collection that includes a smattering of Gothic works, a few minor Baroque works by fresco specialists Kremser Schmidt, Maultbertsch and Daniel Gran, and some sentimental Biedermeier paintings. The final room contains the palace's only truly memorable works: a portrait of a woman by Hans Makart, painted with his characteristically dark, chocolate-brown palette, and Max Švabinský's striking Red Sunshade.