The gratuitous exchange of one hundred graphic sheets between the National Gallery in Prague and the British Museumin Londontook place in 1985. The exchange was made possible thanks to the initiative of Sir David Wilson and Jiří Kotalík, the then directors of the two institutions. This ideal example of institutional generosity represented both a mutual enrichment and an act of co-creation; not as in the cases of gifts of other “national” corpuses of artworks that involved a “mere”, though instructive reception.
Both collections intersect in post-World War Two art production and it is precisely the field of graphic art of the 1950s and 1960s that facilitates a small experiment. We have before us works that exist in a number of copies and yet every piece is an original. Even today, both collections can therefore be shown side by side in the National Gallery in Prague. Although this was an exchange of collections as a whole, let us consider the attractive idea that this is a sheet-for-sheet exchange. Perhaps this approach will endow the representative purpose of the works selected from the collection with a more contextual meaning.
The display in the Cabinet of Graphic Art at the Trade Fair Palace has been created as part of the exhibition Generosity: On the Art of Giving.
Curator: Eva Bendová
