At the beginning of the postwar years, the view of interior decoration changed considerably. At the end of the twentieth century, homes were still trying to be as ostentatious as possible, with as many rooms as possible and furnished with the most elegant furniture. “The apartment is the measure of wealth by which one bourgeois measures another,” said the theorist Karel Teige in the 1930s. Gradually, however, historicizing tendencies and unnecessary ornamentation were eliminated, and simple, geometric forms triumphed. The issue of furnishings began to be understood in a complex way in relation to architecture and the type and layout of an apartment. We can see these tendencies here in the decades following the Velvet Revolution, when cheap furnishings from the era of socialism were replaced by either simple furniture of Swedish provenance, or, for the connoisseurs, by furniture from renowned design companies or custom-made furniture. What is important, however, is that along with the new furniture slowly came a trend in buying fine art, which was commonplace among the middle class in the 1930s, and even people with lower incomes were happy to buy a landscape or still life by a local artist to decorate their “fancy room”. In recent years, people in this country have begun to acquire works of art again, either as solitary pieces or by building entire collections. They are buying art as an investment in private companies, or they are equipping large development projects with it. This is a good sign for both artists and the public because the environment in which we move greatly influences our psychological state and therefore who we are and how we function as a society.
The exhibition space of Czech Republic Sotheby’s International Realty is located in a classic rental apartment from the time of the First Republic, and the exhibition Housing Standard will present in this interior a solution for how to treat art in the places where you find yourself most often, whether it is your apartment or the space where you work.
