Prague, September 21st, 2021

Four Museums in the Czech Republic Announce Major Acquisition of Over 2,000 Works as a Gift from Renowned Czech Photographer Josef Koudelka

This press release from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic is for the official announcement of the generous donation by the world-renowned photographer Josef Koudelka to the Czech Republic. The announcement is being made at the Ministry of Culture, in Prague, on 21 September 2021. This unprecedented gift by a living artist to four major museums in the Czech Republic is remarkable in its scale both in the Czech Republic and abroad.

"Mr Koudelka, I appreciate immensely the fact that you have decided to donate your world-famous photographs to the Czech Republic. I consider it an obligation not only to preserve your work with sensitive care, but also to find a worthy and fitting way to present celebrated Czech photographers like yourself, Sudek, and Drtikol at home and abroad.” Lubomír Zaorálek, Minister of Culture, 21 September 2021

Few artists who have spent most of their lives abroad have done so much for the Czech Republic, for the presentation of Czech culture by means of pictures and topics that touch each of us. Josef Koudelka is one of the most important humanist photographers in the world, and although human beings have gradually vanished from his photographs, his profound interest in humankind is still present in them.

The donation to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

Years ago, Josef Koudelka decided to donate to his native land a large set of photographs, which would represent his life’s work. “I think that the best of what I have ever done in my life should remain in the country where I was born.”
In all, he is donating to his native country about two thousand photographs, the most substantial part of which (1,800 works) is going to the Photography Collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague (Uměleckoprůmyslové museum v Praze – UPM). The first part of the Donation was completed in 2018, when the UPM mounted the large retrospective entitled Koudelka: Returning in its newly renovated and remodelled main building. The exhibition was held to mark the photographer’s eightieth birthday and encompassed the essential works from his career. The exhibition was accompanied by a comprehensive publication of the same name. Published in Czech and in English editions, it includes considerable documentation and articles written especially for it by Stuart Alexander, Josef Chuchma, Jan Mlčoch, Josef Moucha, Tomáš Pospěch and Irena Šorfová, together with an essay by Anna Fárová written in 1967.

The donation agreement for the second part of the gift to the UPM was signed this year and another part is currently being prepared. “I am glad about the care that the Museum of Decorative Arts has so far given to my donation and I believe that my work will be in good hands here.”

The large donation to the UPM comprises not only the retrospective, with the various series entitled Beginnings, Experiments, Theatre, Gypsies, Invasion, Exiles, and Panoramas, as well as the sets of the panoramic photographs from the DATAR project, The Black Triangle, Chaos, Traces, Industries, Camarque, Teatro del Tempo, Lime Stone and others, but also, among other things, the yet unpublished set of photographs of home-made posters by Czechoslovak citizens, which Koudelka took in the streets of Prague during the Soviet-led invasion in August 1968.

“It is for me and the Museum, with its tradition going back to 1885, a true honour and source of satisfaction that it can henceforth look after the life’s work of Josef Koudelka and, thanks to its collaboration with his foundation, it can help to spread his legacy not only at home but all over the world!” says Helena Koenigsmarková, the Director of the Museum.

The negotiations concerning the size of the donation, which had taken place since 2007, were mainly about the terms and conditions of the gift, which included the manner of storing the works, the possibility of checking the conditions of their storage, copyright, loans to other museums, the specifications of licensing the use of the donated prints and limiting their use, for example, in commercial items, and, last but not least, making the collections accessible for research. In the meantime, the UPM built a new repository (completed in 2016), where the donated works are currently housed. This has made possible the creation of a suitable environment for the storage and care not only of the photography collection, but also of all the other materials at international conservation standards. The work does not, however, end with the signing of the donation agreement: for example, the donation still needs to be catalogued, a list of the items comprising it must be drawn up, as must the documentation, and guidelines for international touring exhibitions of the works. 
 


In December 2019 Tomáš Pospěch was appointed Curator in the photography department. He is in charge of looking after the Koudelka collection and the cataloguing, conservation and research of the donation at the UPM.

The Josef Koudelka donation is uniquely important. Together with the extensive collection of photographs by František Drtikol and Josef Sudek, which were also donated to the UPM in the past, the Josef Koudelka collection will be among the most important collections of internationally renowned photography in a Czech institution.

Both rare and unique vintage and early photographs make up the core of the collection donated to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. Among the other leading institutions holding his works are the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Maison de la Photographie (Paris), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).

Donations to other institutions

Apart from the donation to the UPM, Josef Koudelka decided to give a complete collection of works from the Invasion 68 exhibition which toured to many different international venues since 2008, to the National Museum in Prague. They are photos from the book of the same name, published in twelve different language editions in 2008 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. “I am very glad that the National Museum keenly welcomed this set into its collections, because the photographs will be presented here in another context, that is, a historical one, and, moreover, many of them show what was then happening below the windows of the National Museum and elsewhere on Wenceslas Square,” says Josef Koudelka.

Koudelka, who comes from Moravia, has also chosen more than a hundred photographs, which he offered, at the request of the curator of photography Antonín Dufek, to the Moravian Gallery in Brno. This institution, which since the 1960s has built up an important collection of Czech photography, is being given a selection from three series – The Black Triangle, Invasion 68 and Gypsies (many of which were made in Moravia).

“The unusually generous way in which the world-renowned photographer Josef Koudelka has decided to donate his photographs for the benefit of Czech institutions, including the Moravian Gallery, deserves exceptional recognition. At a time when it is very difficult to get funding for acquisitions, the donation of key photographs by Josef Koudelka means a fundamental enrichment of how his work is represented in our collection,” says Jan Press, the Director of the Moravian Gallery in Brno.

Josef Koudelka also offered an important set of photographs to the National Gallery in Prague. It comprises eighteen large-format photographs, titled De-creazione, originally printed and exhibited within the Pavilion of the Holy See at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

The Josef Koudelka Foundation

The non-profit Josef Koudelka Foundation was established in 2019 to protect the integrity of his life’s-work and collaborate with international art institutions in placing major groups of his photographs in their collections. Koudelka is the Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board, which consists of his friends and trusted collaborators of many years: Irena Šorfová, Jonathan Roquemore and Stuart Alexander, and his legal representative, František Vyskočil. 


“I am putting my affairs in order. I established the Foundation to protect my work, to keep it undivided. I approached people whom I have known for years; friends with whom I have worked for a long time will now be responsible for the protection of my work, in the true sense of the word protection. They have my complete confidence. I do not want anyone after my death to do whatever he or she wants to do with my work. I do not want my work to be distorted or misrepresented in any way. I edited my work meticulously over many years. The Foundation knows my wishes and views, and in that spirit it will look after everything, including the completion of all the documentation. I hope that I manage to finish all the important things I would still like to do, but if not, I know that thanks to the Foundation everything will be well looked after.”

JOSEF KOUDELKA was born in Boskovice, Moravia, in 1938. Originally an aeronautical engineer, he began to devote himself to photography in 1958. At that time, he photographed the productions of several Prague theatres and the life of the Roma in Moravia and Slovakia. In 1968 in Prague, he documented the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. The following year, to mark the anniversary of the invasion, several of these photographs were published in many foreign periodicals, and were attributed to “P.P.” (that is, Prague Photographer), without Koudelka knowing about it first. The Overseas Press Club of America awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal to the “anonymous Czech photographer” of these works. Today they are widely considered classic examples of post-war photojournalism. (To mark the fortieth anniversary of the invasion, Koudelka published a book in 2008, which contains 249 photographs, with accompanying articles and other texts by historians. The book was published in twelve different language editions.) Fearing possible reprisals, Koudelka decided to leave his native country in 1970. He left for Great Britain, where he was granted political asylum. In 1974 he became a member of the Magnum Photos agency. Later, he left for France, and in 1987 was granted French citizenship. In collaboration with Robert Delpire, he published the book Gitans: La fin du voyage (1975). This was followed, in 1988, by the book Exiles. Since that time, Koudelka has published fifteen books documenting human influence on the land. In 2019 he established the Josef Koudelka Foundation, of which he is Founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board. www.josefkoudelka.org

A history of the Photography Collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague

The Photography Collection of the UPM was established in 1969. Its origins in the museum, however, were actually in 1902, when the museum acquired its first photograph, a daguerreotype portrait of a lady, made by Wilhelm Horn. Since 1922, the collection has been systematically built and added to, even though political events often made that difficult, if not impossible. After the unfortunate merging of the Museum of Decorative Arts and the National Gallery in Prague, in 1959, almost the whole photography collection was removed from the museum. Fortunately, the collection was saved from destruction and was temporarily held by the National Technical Museum in Prague. When the museum regained its independence at the end of the 1960s, a new era of the Photography Collection began. Its new curator, Anna Fárová, took it back from the National Technical Museum, and started systematic acquisitions. From 1969 to 1976, she succeeded in buying unique sets of works by great figures of photography between the two world wars and to add to the holdings with works by younger photographers. Even after being forced to leave the museum for having signed the Charter 77 human rights document, she catalogued the photographs and papers of the late Josef Sudek, and in 1978 and 1988 about 20,000 prints and 27,000 negatives were transferred to the museum. After Fárová, acquisition work and important exhibition activity at the museum was carried out by Kateřina Klaricová, Zdeněk Kirschner and, briefly, Ludvík Hlaváček. Beginning in 1990, the curator of the Photography Collection has been Jan Mlčoch and, since 1997, its administrator has been Jitka Štětková. In the course of the last thirty years, the museum has held dozens of exhibitions and lent works for major exhibitions at home and abroad, and has published or contributed to many photographic publications.

Currently, the Photography Collection is looked after by two full-time employees and one-part time employee. The collection comprises more than 100,000 items, including 30,000 negatives and other documents. The largest sets by classics of Czech photography were donated to the museum by the photographers themselves – František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, and Josef Koudelka. This shows that the greatest personalities are also endowed with extraordinary generosity.

The Collection of Photographs and New Media at the Moravian Gallery in Brno

Established in 1962, the collection is one of the oldest European collections of art photographs in a museum of art. It comprises about 35,000 items, that is, prints made using early and contemporary techniques, including daguerreotypes, traditional photographic printing processes, gelatin silver prints, and inkjet prints), covering the whole history of the photographic medium in what is today the Czech Republic. Considering the historical development of the country, the collection also includes a good number of Slovak photographers and photographers from what was Austria-Hungary. It also includes about 300 works by foreign photographers.

The items in the collection are deposited in ways conforming to their particular physical requirements. The collection is expertly catalogued and presented to the public. In the course of almost sixty years, it has presented its holdings in hundreds of exhibitions at home and abroad, and has created unique sets of photographs, in particular placing pictorial photography and avant-garde photography from between the two world wars into the international context.

Since the beginning of the new millennium the collection has also come to include Czech video art and has concentrated to a greater extent on the acquisition, cataloguing, and presentation of the papers and archives of important Czech photographers, including Jan Svoboda, Dagmar Hochová, and Jiří Jeníček. As part of this work, the collection has acquired photographers’ personal archives of negatives, amounting to probably more than half a million items.The history of the collection, the list of photographers whose works form part of it, and the exhibition activity are published in the book V plném spektru: Fotografie 1841–2005 ze sbírky Moravské galerie v Brně (2011), published in English as Full Spectrum: Fifty Years of Collecting Photography in the Moravian Gallery in Brno (2012).

For Press inquiries relating to the release above, please contact archive@josefkoudelka.org

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