"Chuť kupovat živé umění" : z korespondence brněnského sběratele moderního umění Františka Dvořáčka

The article presents to the public newly discovered documents which help throw light on the activity as a collector of the prominent lover and patron of modern art František Dvořáček (1891–1967), who was technical director and partner in a small electrical firm in Brno, but also co-founder and active member of the Section of Friends of Art, established in 1933 in association with the Group of Visual Artists in Brno. The documents here published and edited for the first time include fragments of Dvořáček's correspondence with Czech painters (Emil Filla, František Muzika, Jan Bauch, Linka Procházková and Karel Černý), and with individual (Oldřich Kubišta) and institutional collectors (the Association of Friends of the Modern Gallery in Prague), and also documents recording the purchase of a small collection of paintings, drawings and prints by French artists or other artists settled in Paris (Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Francis Picabia, Wasilly Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Luis Fernandez, Wardell Power, Otto Freundlich), made on his behalf by the painter František Foltýn in Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's Galerie Simon in 1935. These newly published materials – taken in conjunction with the catalogues of exhibitions held in the 1930s to which Dvořáček unselfishly lent works from his collection of Czech and French modern art, and especially with those paintings and drawings that have been preserved in the holdings of Czech art museums (the Brno City Museum, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, the Olomouc Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Prague, the West Bohemian Gallery in Plzeň, the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery in Hluboká nad Vltavou, the Karlovy Vary Art Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové, or the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region) – provide important information in helping to reconstruct the appearance of Dvořáček's collection at that time.