Exhibition:

Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries

First Floor:

Foreign Fine Art (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch, Joan Miró, Bernard Buffet, Henry Moore, Antoni Tápies, Joseph Beuys, Lucio Fontana, Geoffrey Hendricks, Tony Cragg)

Second Floor:

Czech Modern Art III, Contemporary Art (René Roubíček, Adriena Šimotová, Václav Boštík, Jan Koblasa, Jiří Kolář, Aleš Veselý, Zbyněk Sekal, Karel Nepraš, Eva Kmentová, Hugo Demartini, Stanislav Kolíbal, Karel Malich, Zdeněk Sýkora, Jiří Sopko, Jiří Kovanda, Jiří Georg Dokoupil)

Third Floor:

Czech Modern Art II

(Otto Gutfreund, Emil Filla, Antonín Procházka, Bohumil Kubišta, Josef Čapek, Václav Špála, Jan Zrzavý)

French Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries

(Eugene Delacroix, Camille Corot, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jean B. Carpeaux, Auguste Rodin, Emile Antoine Bourdelle)

Fourth Floor:

Czech Modern Art I

(Antonín Slavíček, Jakub Schikaneder, Alfons Mucha, Max Švabinský, František Kupka, Josef Váchal)

Fifth Floor:

Czech and Slovak contemporary sculpture (Jan Jakub Kotík, Marek Kvetán, Krištof Kintera, Petr Písařík, Jiří Černický, Pavla Sceránková)

The image of the period is complemented with examples of architecture, furniture, the applied arts, fashion, design and stage design as well as photographs, drawings and prints concentrated in graphic cabinets. Nearest public transport station: Veletržní palác

DESCRIPTION

Trade Fair Palace After the first Prague Sample Fair Trade held in 1920, the idea of building a new exhibition ground originated because the old exhibition area was not sufficient anymore. As early as 1919 the Prague Sample Fair Trades were established in order to support the economics of the new state and to build its own commercial centre independent from Vienna. The Building Cooperative was established that bought a land near the old fairgrounds in order to build three commercial palaces and a hotel as a business centre as well as a representation seat of the companies that ran business with us.

Architects Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs were entrusted with working out a design of the new building. The construction process started in 1925 and the first trade fair palace (veletržní palác) was ceremonially opened on the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Republic in 1928.

However, due to financial reasons this palace remained the only one. At that time it was the biggest construction of its kind in the world and the first building in a new style of Functionalism in Prague. A single huge rectangular block with two underground plus eight above-ground storeys was built on the area of 140 x 80 m. Two central showrooms had 24 000 square metres of the exhibition area: in the southern part there is a 15-metre high hall with a ground plan of 80 x 40 m, originally for heavy engineering industry products, around which individual exhibition floors rise with a simple reinforced concrete structure.

The other is a small gallery hall in the northern part, running through all floors, with top lighting, too; it is one of the most impressive spaces of the 20th century buildings. In addition to the fair exhibition, in autumn of 1928 the Slav Epic (Slovanská epopej) was also introduced there, donated to Prague by Alfons Mucha. In the 30s there were established a cinema in the basement, a restaurant on the ground floor and a view café on the 6th floor.

The palace served to its original purpose until 1949 with a break during the Nazi occupation when the German used it among others as a gathering place for the Jews before their deportation to concentration camps. From 1951 it served as an administrative building to several businesses in foreign trade. On 14 August 1974 the palace completely burnt down and even its demolishing was considered.

However, in 1976 it was listed in the State Register of Immovable Cultural Monuments and two years later assigned to the National Gallery for a permanent exhibition of modern art. It was reconstructed for this purpose according to a design by architect Miroslav Masák and designers of the SIAL Liberec Company. The inauguration of theNational Gallery exhibition was held on 13 December 1995.