Modern and contemporary art in a 1928 functionalist trade-fair building that Le Corbusier came to see and left rattled by.
The building
Built in 1928 as a trade fair palace, and one of the first functionalist buildings of its scale anywhere — seven floors around a vast glazed atrium. Le Corbusier visited and reportedly said that seeing it had shown him what he had only been theorising about, then complained it was not radical enough, which is a very Le Corbusier response.
It burned out in 1974 and was rebuilt as a gallery, opening in 1995. The atrium is the best thing about it and it is worth standing in the middle of the ground floor for a minute.
The collections
The National Gallery’s modern and contemporary holdings, spread over several floors.
Czech cubism is the reason to make the trip. Between roughly 1911 and 1914, a group of Prague artists and architects — Josef Gočár, Pavel Janák, Otto Gutfreund, Emil Filla — took cubism out of painting and applied it to buildings, furniture, ceramics and glass. Nobody else did this. There are cubist chairs, cubist lamps, cubist sofas, and out in the city there are cubist apartment blocks and a cubist lamppost.
Czech modernism more broadly: Kupka, whose abstract work from 1912 has a claim to being among the first anywhere; Toyen and the Czech surrealists; Šíma; the interwar avant-garde.
French nineteenth and twentieth century — a genuinely good collection acquired in the 1920s and 30s, including Picasso, Braque, Cézanne, Monet, Rodin, Klimt and Schiele.
Contemporary on the upper floors, with the temporary programme.
The Slav Epic by Mucha has been shown here at times. Its location has moved repeatedly amid disputes; check before travelling for it.
Practical
Closed Mondays. There are free entry periods — the National Gallery has run free admission on certain days and for under-26s; check the current policy, which changes.
Three hours does it. The building is large and the signage is not intuitive.
Around it
Holešovice is the old industrial district around it and is where a good deal of Prague’s contemporary culture has moved — DOX contemporary art centre, the Vnitroblock complex, and the Prague Market halls.
Letná Park is a ten-minute walk south, with the beer garden and the view over the bridges.
Cubist Prague, outside the gallery
If the cubism interests you, the buildings are walkable in the Old Town and Vyšehrad: the House of the Black Madonna at Celetná 34, with the Grand Café Orient on the first floor restored to its cubist interior, and the Kovařovic Villa and the cubist lamppost near Vyšehrad.
More Museums
Mucha Museum
The posters that invented Art Nouveau, made in Paris by a Moravian who considered them commercial work and spent eighteen years on the epic he thought mattered.
Museum of Communism
Forty years of a system that shaped everyone here, told through a schoolroom, a shop with nothing in it, an interrogation room and the footage from November 1989.