Here's a name that provokes a jarring mental image: The Trade Fair Palace. To a New Yorker, it seems akin to calling our convention center "The Javits Center Mansion."
Just like Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, the Trade Fair Palace is no regal residence.
When you approach the building, you have a moment of confusion--is this an office building? Is it a sales office for work furniture, as the ground floor salesroom suggests, with its row of red, green and blue Knoll chair knockoffs waiting to be filled by budding-capitalist behinds? And what is that big, ungainly metal....thing....in front of the building? It is sculpture, my friends. Art. Kind of...ugly art.
As is, to some extent, the Trade Fair Palace, which was built in the functionalist style and originally designed in 1926-28 to hold 10,000 visitors and 4,000 exhibitors. According to "art/shop/eat Prague" Le Corbusier was one of the first visitors, and "claimed that the building showed him how Functionalism could be applied on a pioneeringly vast scale." And the vast white space, which centers around an atrium from which you can see works of art on all four Gallery floors, is appealing, though I wouldn't rhapsodize about it to the extent that "art/shop/eat Prague" does.
The fact that I didn't particularly warm up to the Trade Fair Palace is partly because I'm used to lavish Western museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, the MOMA. I'm spoiled by being surrounded by well-funded museums with well-paid curators who have actual budgets to work with and pay great attention to how the works are displayed. The Frick, one of my favorites, even has a full-time horticulturalist on staff, who has been with it for 30 years and arranges gorgeous flower displays, which currently include red peonies worked into Christmas wreaths. (He may be the subject of a future posting.)
The Trade Fair Palace is officially called the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art 0f the National Gallery in Prague. The lighting is basic, the partitions are basic, the floor is speckled linoleum. But it does have something on Western museums--you can pay just for the floors you want to visit. And the 3rd floor has some very good 19th and 20th-Century French Art. Favorites from a number of the floors: the van Gogh; the small Moore sculptures; the stylized paintings of Jan Zrzavy; the two Munchs; Klimt's "The Virgins," and the collection of Picassos, especially the one with the cubist frame by architect and leading theorist of the Czech cubist movement Pavel Janak. Here are a few of his designs you'll probably recognize (and can learn more about and even perhaps buy (well, some of them!) here).
Much of the collection was acquired by the Czechoslovak State in 1923, and a big chunk of good stuff (many of the Picassos and Braques) came from Vincenc Kramar, the director of the National Gallery in the 1920s. He was "encouraged" by the Communists to "donate" his extensive collection to the National Gallery before his death--I think that's how a tag at the Gallery phrased it. "art/shop/eat Prague" puts it like this: "He was forced to donate his collection to the Gallery in 1960, a few months before his death at age 83."
The logistics: A 15-minute or so tram ride from the New Town area of Prague takes you close to the Palace--you just have a 10-minute walk up a mild hill and a jog to the right. It's pretty easy to find. There is a great creperie with a painted red front to the left a block or so from where you exit the tram. (The actual name of the place--yeah, that would be kind of helpful!--will be added to this post soon.)
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