The building of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Painting
(until recently chronologically divided into the Collection of the 1st
and 2nd Halves of the 20th Century) began immediately after the founding
of the Slovak National Gallery (1948). It was created from transfers
from former state institutions and through purchases from artists and
private persons.
Curators Karol Vaculík and Ľudmila
Peterajová played crucial roles in creating this collection. During the
1950s and 1960s, noteworthy sets of work from the turn of the 19th
century, the supreme works of the classics of Slovak Modernist art (M.
Benka, G. Mallý, M. A. Bazovský, Ľ. Fulla, M. Galanda, I. Weiner-Kráľ),
Košice - Eastern Slovak avant-garde (A. Jasusch, K. Bauer, J. Jakoby)
and the artists of the so-called generations of 1909 and 1919 (C.
Majerník, J. Mudroch, P. Matejka, E. Nevan, E. Šimerová-Martinčeková, V.
Hložník, L. Guderna, E. Zmeták, etc.) were successfully collected
through well thought out acquisition activities (and as a result of the
collection of formalist works) and are presented in a truly
representative way in the SNG. This well-profiled and, to a certain
extent, closed set of Slovak modern painting became an inseparable
foundation of each generational interpretation (exhibition, book and
exposition) of the history of Slovak Modernist art.
The
building of this collection over the years also reflected the interest
in enriching it by works of most contemporary painting. Thus, in the
1960s they managed to create a noteworthy collection of works of
neo-modernist painting of the 1960s: from the rising authors, who
achieved the first culminations of their work in that period, through
the generation of Galanda followers (M. Laluha, A. Barčík, M. Paštéka,
R. Krivoš, R. Fila, A. Klimo, V. Kraicová) up to the classics, who at
that time had achieved a new synthesis.
The growth of this
progressively profiled set was halted by Normalization; in the 1970s and
1980s, the further broadening of the collection of contemporary
painting was rather "extensive" and affected by ideological and
cultural-political requirements with an emphasis on a wide
representation of "engaged" art.
A new shift, particularly in
the profiling of the collection of the painting of the second half of
the 20th century, occurred only after 1989, when the gaps inherited from
the previous period were partially filled in and the collection was
enriched by new and older works of the key contemporary Slovak painters:
R. Fila, M. Paštéka, R. Sikora, J. Bartusz, S. Filko, V. Popovič, J.
Koller, M. Urbásek, M. Čunderlík, as well as younger authors: K.
Bočkayová, M. Bočkay, D. Fischer and the postmodernist artists, such as
L. Teren, I. Csudai and others.
New paintings were acquired
after 2000 through purchases of the works of the most contemporary
authors (B. Hostiňák, D. Sadovská, D. Lehocká, M. Kollár, M. Czinege and
others). The collection also contains some European painting (M.
Čermínová-Toyen, O. Domiguéz, S. Carchoune, M. Weilerand others).
