Letenské Sady (Letná Park) is raised on a plateau above the north bank of the Vltava River, and gives good views across Prague. I went there on a wet Thursday morning, which probably didn't help.
Metronom, a kinetic sculpture by Vratislav Karel Novák, was erected in 1991 on a massive plinth that until the early 1960s had supported a sculpture of Stalin. It ticked away morosely as I wandered around, and the plaza behind it looked neglected and trashed.
Walking around Letenské Sady it felt like this must be where Prague's bored or desperate hang out; especially since there was some interesting graffiti on the walls.
If you follow the Vltava south from Letenské Sady and back in towards the center of town you come to The Museum Kampa, housed in an old mill near the Charles Bridge. It holds a large collection of Central European modern art, and permanent exhibitions of work by Czech artists František Kupka and Otto Gutfreund.
I found Kupka's paintings and drawings (none of them are on this page) particularly interesting. He was one of the pioneers of abstract art and orphism, and his pictures explored motion, colour and space in a style that reminded me a lot of the early experiments in animation by Viking Eggeling and Ocsar Fischinger.
The current exhibition when I was there was Re-evolution, by the Cracking Art Group. Founded in Italy in 1993, the group is made up of six European artists with varying styles but a common interest in materials and environment.
The pieces that most caught my eye were the much-larger-than-life, brightly coloured animals made out of recycled plastic bottles...
The pieces that most caught my eye were the much-larger-than-life, brightly coloured animals made out of recycled plastic bottles...
Upstairs were works by Czech, Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslavian artists from the last half of the 20th Century, that spoke directly to the history of those times.
