Exhibition Forgotten Masters. The Changing Nature of Artistic Success presents the works of ten painters who came last in a visitor poll held as part of the exhibition The Search for a Masterpiece (8 October 2023 –26 May 2024) and who have long been overlooked by art history. In recent decades, there have been very few, if any, exhibitions or monographs on them.
The works of these forgotten masters are presented in three sections that imitate the exhibition styles of the normalisation, postwar, and interwar periods. Each artist is “placed” in the period when they could have had their first retrospective, on the threshold between recognition and obscurity, before their place in art history was sealed or forgotten.
The exhibition explores why certain artists (posthumously) achieve fame, and whether a place in the canon is truly the only measure of artistic success. Each artist represented here found some form of success – through awards, commissions, teaching, regional renown, or living off their own creations – but their names never made it into the textbooks. Does that make them any less successful than artists whose works now draw crowds to galleries, but who scraped by in poverty during their lifetimes? And is the work of these overlooked figures truly of inferior quality? That is for visitors to judge.
The exhibition includes works by: Augustin Němejc (1861–1938), Ferdinand Engelmüller (1867–1924), Karel Boháček (1886–1928), Antonín Pelc (1895–1967), Karel Meisner (1904–1979), Alois Vitík (1910–1972), Jarmila Zábranská-Sychrová (1910–1991), Otta Mizera (1919–1952), Willy Horný (1933–1982), Jaroslav Jeřábek (1936–2022).
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.
