Publication details
Mýtus „chudého“ sběratele a Max Švabinský „čestným horníkem“ : Umění jako nástroj sociální nivelizace v socialistickém Československu
| Title in English | The myth of the “poor” collector and Max Švabinský as an “honorary miner” : Art as a tool for social levelling in socialist Czechoslovakia |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Tvůrce jako předmět dějin umění : Pozice autora po jeho smrti : Sborník 6. sjezdu historiků umění |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Keywords | socialist Czechoslovakia; status of artworks and ideology; Max Švabinský; art collecting; art market; art as propaganda and manipulation |
| Attached files | |
| Description | In contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to the study of art history, against the backdrop of the changing historical experience over the last century there arises the question of the symbolic and pragmatic roles that art has played as part of social discourse. This paper presents examples of semantic media manipulation and the deliberate social levelling of the official image of an artwork and the role of its creator, collector and recipient in socialist Czechoslovakia in the years 1948–1960. The transformation of the social paradigm after 1948 and attempts to ideologically control society also extended to the “production” of art. The artwork, which had traditionally been granted the status of an object with an intellectual value and was simultaneously an attribute of the lifestyle of the social elites, became an object and instrument of semantic manipulation and social levelling. Its role was redefined at the turn of the 1940s and 50s: it was to become a widely affordable aesthetic consumer product with an educative dimension, disseminating desirable content and visual symbols in the public sphere. The artist also became the subject of public manipulation, and was now valued for how he or she served the people (the categories of “merited” and “national” artist) and worked for a better future for society as a whole. At the same time the artist was also lowered to the same level as “the people”. An example of the social levelling of an artist formerly raised on a pedestal was the aging Max Švabinský (according to Zdeněk Nejedlý, “an artist in his thinking but a labourer in his work”; the contemporary press celebrated him as an “honorary miner”). This social and price levelling, annulling the special status of an artwork, also applied to its recipient: the “small socialist” or “poor” collector from the ranks of workers, farmers and the working intelligentsia, to whom the Dílo shops offered ideologically correct and affordable production. The idea that art collecting, formerly the privilege of the elites, could be cultivated in the new society, without the mechanisms of capitalist speculation, as a cheap, educative and autodidactic hobby in the spirit of socialist ideology was one of the key paradigms of the early post-war period. |