Tag: Uzhhorod

The Art of Subcarpathian Rus 1919-1938 – Czechoslovak Footprint: Exhibition Review

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In response to current broader reconsiderations about how art, design and architecture in the First Czechoslovak Republic should be represented, the East Slovak Gallery in Košice is currently exhibiting The Art of Subcarpathian Rus 1919-1938 ­– Czechoslovak Footprint, which showcases paintings, prints and sculptures from the First Republic’s easternmost region. Built on the premise that artistic life in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, as the region is dominantly referred to in English, proliferated under Czechoslovak administration after 1918, the exhibition, curated by Miroslav Kleban, ties the region’s cultural development to the modernization efforts of the First Republic’s eastern regions.

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The First Czechoslovak Republic: Exhibition review

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In October 2018, as part of the centenary celebrations of the founding of Czechoslovakia, the Gallery of Modern Art in the Veletržní palác (Trade Fair Palace) in Prague, a constituent part of the National Gallery, rehung its collection of early twentieth-century Czech art. In the place of a chronological arrangement covering the period from 1900 to 1930 is a more thematic display, with the title 1918-1938: The First Czechoslovak Republic. Originally intended to mark a particular moment, it has become a semi-permanent display; hence, a year after its unveiling, it merits a second look.

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Uzhhorod Modernism

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The Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod is little known internationally. A provincial centre with a population of some 115,000, it is located to the east of interwar Czechoslovakia in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, a region that briefly enjoyed a higher profile in 1939 as the short-lived Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, one of the many ‘vanished kingdoms’ of which Norman Davies has so eloquently written.[1] Yet while it may, for many, merely be a footnote in the history books, consideration of the past of Uzhhorod throws an illuminating light on political events in central Europe, their intertwining with art and architecture, and their continuing significance for the present.

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