Meda Mládková, an art collector that collected a large collection of works by Czech artists, including famous modernist František Kupka, has died at the age of 102. The Kampa Museum, the Prague institution she founded, posted about her death on Tuesday on social media.
“Mida, though she lived a large part of her long life abroad, was always a great patriot and loved the Czech nation,” the museum books. “When political conditions allowed her to return to the country, she contributed to the cultural development of the Czech Republic like few others.”
Born in 1919 in Zakopane, Czechoslovakia, Mladkova has spent a large part of her life outside her homeland. Before World War II, she worked as a manager at the local brewery and later at Škoda Auto. After the war, she moved to Geneva to study for her Ph.D. in the economy. She was in the Swiss city in 1948, when the Soviets took control of her motherland, and has stayed out of Czechoslovakia in the years that followed.
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Her presence outside the country, now known as Czechia, helped put her in touch with some of the artists with whom she founded close days. In Paris, Mladkova became friendly with Kupka, a painter known for his abstractions in which levels of color seem to break through one another. Mladikova, together with her husband Jan, an economist who died in 1989, collected more than 200 paintings by Kupka, making her collection of his art one of the deepest in the world.
Maladkova’s enthusiasm for Kupka was deep. According to the leaders of the Kampa Museum, Mladkova once even She sold her house To buy a Kupka board called Graph localization II (1912/13). In 1984, she gave the painting to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it remains today.
Its collection also included some 240 works by Jerry Colau, a poet who also crafted compositions in which images of notable artworks are broken down by pieces of text, as well as 17 sculptures by Otto Gutfreund, a cubist who captured aspects of the movement while studying in Paris.
As recently as 2012, Maldkova was still splitting her time between Washington, D.C. and Prague, returning in 1989. In 2003, she opened the Kampa Museum.
Czech politician Jiri Pospichel, who serves as chairman of the museum’s board of directors, wrote on twitter On Tuesday, she “has believed all her life in the idea: ‘If culture continues, so will the nation.'”
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