In October, GASK opened an exhibition of works by presidential portraitist Vratislav Nechleba

On 12 October, the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Regions (GASK) opened an exhibition of works by university teacher and portraitist of social elites Vratislav Nechleba. It is the first large retrospective exhibition of Nechleba’s work, accompanied by a lavish monograph comprehensively summarising his oeuvre and the findings of archival research. The gallery’s main exhibition of the autumn season, Watch Out, He’s Here… Vratislav Nechleba (1885–1965): A Verist Ensnared by Modernism, runs until 2 March 2025.

The story of Vratislav Nechleba lives on in the Czech cultural consciousness mainly thanks to the short stories of Ota Pavel, who portrayed him as a distinctive and legendary painter of the First Republic’s elite. Despite Nechleba’s reputation at the time, his work – which provides interesting testimony about the painter’s personality and the era’s society – is practically unknown among experts and the general public alike. Nechleba spent his entire life working alone. As an artist, he avoided the era’s changing artistic trends and his contemporaries’ experimentation with form. Instead, he placed great value on the ability to penetrate his subjects’ psyche, building on the legacy of the old masters while at the same time mastering virtuosic painting techniques, with an emphasis on veristic details and realistic painting.

‘The main impulse for this retrospective exhibition was the generous gift of an extensive set of works from the artist’s estate, presented in 2001 to the Czech Museum of Fine Arts (today’s Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region) by Mrs. Anna Nechlebová. Over the past four years, many of these works have been carefully restored – a process that has contributed to a better understanding of the technical aspects of Nechleba’s works and of the artist as a person while providing a closer view of his clientele’, says exhibition curator Vanda Skálová. At the same time, the study of this large group of works raised numerous questions regarding the personality of the artist and the nature of his work, including his social status and his status on the art scene, his self-presentation strategies and the construction of his artistic image with a view to the traditional models of 19th-century academic painting. The exhibition and the planned publication also look at Nechleba’s work with a view to the current process of reassessing reductive interpretations of modern art that marginalised and excluded figurative and realistic art from the art historical discourse.

The exhibition at GASK is divided into several thematic sections. On an area of nearly 700 m², visitors will find more than one hundred works by Nechleba, primarily portraits. Over the course of Nechleba’s life, his clients included members of the cultural, economic and political elite from across the ideological spectrum, including Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Karel Kramář, Klement Gottwald, the actor Eduard Vojan and the banker and philanthropist Jaroslav Preiss, among others. One section of the exhibition is devoted to self-portraits, which hold an important position in his work. The exhibition also includes works by contemporary representatives of hyperrealistic painting, which act as interventions or parallels with the aim of linking Nechleba’s oeuvre with contemporary art.

The exhibition includes an accompanying programme titled Crumbs from Nechleba, featuring a First Republic evening with swing music, lectures, a programme composed from memories of the artist’s contemporaries, guided tours and educational programmes by the GASK Learning Centre.