At the beginning of February, a major retrospective of Czech design just ended at the Sovovy Mlýny gallery. I managed to see it literally under the wire.
Museum Kampa is a prominent example of a successful private and commercial art institution—a role model and apparent evidence of the self-sustainability of the capitalist model in the art world. However, the political favor that the museum has received since its founding proves, more than any claims of self-sustainability, that economic and political power often go hand in hand. The museum’s founder, Meda Mládková, an anti-communist heroine, is widely regarded as a paradigmatic example of a self-made woman who brought capitalist virtues to post-communist Czechoslovakia, after spending half a century in exile.
In telling this success story, though, one often forgets that she pragmatically married a Belgian aristocrat to secure financial independence and gain foreign citizenship, as well as befriending the influential Czech right-wing politician Jiří Pospíšil in her later years, who became her advocate and guardian. Now, nearly three years after her death, she has become not just a role model but a brand. Czech director Adéla Stodolová staged her life in a play called MEDA, and museum visitors can buy Meda-themed merchandise, including soaps with her face on them. How appropriate this is, given that in the middle of the last century, people in Auschwitz were literally turned into soap, I hesitate to say. But I doubt this is a mark of good cultural virtue.

In the first hall of the exhibition, various expressions of the optimism of modernism’s heyday were on display. Posters and artifacts from the First Czechoslovak Republic stood side by side with those from the subsequent period of socialist construction. The differences were subtle—some minor shifts in phrasing, wording, colors—but the central message was clear: We are building our collective future. This is to be our century, the overture to a new utopia without wars or enemies. Of course, there were enemies—plenty of them. The unity of these progressive messages was disrupted by the apex of modernist and anti-modernist dialectic: Nazi propaganda. Like two peas in a pod, the optimism of utopia and the hatred for those who stood in its way.
The Janus-faced nature of modernism should hardly surprise us. But what still takes me aback (as I am, after all, an idealist) is the denial. The left side of the exhibition, depicting the heroic, progressive Czechoslovakian Republic, was labeled “State Service,” while the other side, dedicated to postwar history, was simply labeled “Propaganda” and “Manipulation.” From a strict design history perspective, the difference was minimal. It was still propaganda, still modernism, still our history—the progressive promises they made us, promises that were never fulfilled.

From my office window, I have a nice view of the former Communist Party administration building, which was built in the 1970s by architects Miroslav Spurný and František Jakubec. Although the “White House” (as the building is widely known) has served as a clinic and health center for decades, people in Brno, influenced by its history, consider it ugly. Yet, despite this ideological evaluation, it remains a sensitive intervention in modern architecture within the historical urban landscape. The light facade, made of glass and aluminum and reflecting its surroundings, the artistic manipulation of mass, and the monumental staircase have fascinated my imagination since childhood, when I visited the doctors there.
When you think of Brno, there are few buildings that stand out as much as this one, articulating the modernist identity of the city. The other is Prior. The brutalist icon of Brno always reminds me of family trips—eating pizza with my parents and little sister at one of the city’s first pizzerias, or of Christmas shopping for presents in the city’s only hypermarket at the time. Shopping in that building, already in decline by the 1990s, sparked my imagination as I imagined myself experiencing Prague’s still-celebrated (though now somewhat dull) icon of 1930s modernism—the White Swan. In this way, it symbolically connects pre-war and post-war collectivism in the industrial era.

However, over time, Prior has become a scary, deteriorating space that mirrors the maladies of the society we live in—homeless people, drug addicts, pickpockets. And this is exactly how our utopian dreams have degraded. Neoliberal urban redevelopment consumes modernist dreams, whether in Prague, where brutalist monuments like Transgas or the Central Telecommunications Building were recently demolished, or in Brno, where Prior is set to be torn down.
So, what remains of the modernist dialectics? As we experience the rise of homophobia, protectionism, and nationalism—from the USA to Slovakia—shouldn’t we appreciate modernist optimism rather than destroy its remaining symbols?
When I scanned the last shot, I noticed a rupture in the emulsion. I’ve chosen not to correct this aesthetic defect, as I consider it an imprint of the brutality of late capitalism’s cultural virtues…