Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

The Exhibition of Proletarian Housing, scheduled to take place in the second half of September 1931 at the Kotva Palace in Prague and in January and February 1932 at the Vaňkova Gallery in Brno, stands out from typical exhibitions in two respects. First, it was one of a small number of interwar exhibitions to be banned by the police. In Prague, it remained open for just two or three days, and in Brno, visitors were prevented from entering the exhibition hall altogether. Second, the organizers placed no emphasis on the aesthetic function of the exhibits. Instead, they sought to compile statistical and visual documentation that criticized the capitalist system and exposed the inability of the political parties represented on the Prague and Brno city councils to alleviate the housing crisis affecting the proletariat. The exhibition was shaped historically by the Great Depression, which had affected the Czechoslovak economy since 1929, making it impossible for low-income residents and the unemployed to find adequate housing. It was also a response to the efforts of moderate left-wing parties within the Prague and Brno municipal administrations to develop a program of social housing construction – one that would indeed achieve tangible results over the course of the 1930s. Under the pressure of the crisis, the architects had come to sympathise with the radical communist left. They regarded the efforts of the Social Democratic and National Socialist 'social fascists' as wholly insufficient, and it was precisely this inadequacy they sought to demonstrate through their exhibition. The Prague premiere of the Exhibition of Proletarian Housing thus effectively served as Communist Party agitation ahead of the September municipal council elections, further reinforced by the fact that an exhibition on housing construction in the Soviet Union was being held simultaneously on the same floor of the Kotva Palace. However, in the municipal elections of late September 1931, the Communists suffered a decisive defeat, with the moderate left emerging victorious.

The exhibition was the collective work of the Architecture Section of the Left Front (ASLEF), which was established in Prague and Brno at the turn of 1929–1930. Jan Gillar was its announcer and likely principal coordinator. [Dvořáková 2000] According to the account by Nusim Nesis (pseudonym Ellen) in the journal Tvorba of September 17, 1931, the organizers divided the exhibition into fourteen sections: 1. The number of homeless and inadequately housed persons in Czechoslovakia and in Prague specifically; 2. The origins and causes of the housing crisis under capitalism; 3. Rent and wages; 4. Analysis of the tenant protection law; 5. The law supporting construction activity; 6. Subsidies for the construction of small-unit housing; 7. Who profited from the construction boom; 8. Hygienic conditions; 9. The distance between workplace and residence; 10. A comparison of proletarian and bourgeois dwellings; 11. A critique of attempts to reform popular housing; 12. Factory residential colonies; 13. A critique of cooperative, municipal, and public-benefit construction enterprises; 14. The socialist demagoguery of the Prague municipal council and the social-fascist parties. Alongside photographs, which likely depicted the shacks and temporary dwellings of the poor and unemployed, and possibly a few architectural drawings, the exhibition consisted of statistical diagrams and graphs. These were undoubtedly intended to demonstrate the factual, objective approach of the exhibition's authors to their accumulated data, in keeping with the scientific conception of functionalism championed by Karel Teige and Hannes Meyer, the second director of the Bauhaus. The ASLEF architects drew and coloured these diagrams themselves, incorporating photographs in the style of collages and photomontages. Their works, which were subsequently published in large numbers in the journals Tvorba and Stavitel, were influenced by functionalist typography and the pictorial statistics of the Viennese graphic artist Gerd Arntz and philosopher Otto Neurath, as well as by earlier displays at the Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in Brno in 1928, conceived by the naturalist and ethnographer Vladimír Úlehla and the architect Jiří Kroha. Kroha employed a similar method – though at a considerably higher artistic level – with his students from the Brno technical college to create his cycle Sociological Fragment of Housing between 1930 and 1933.

The Prague exhibition had limited resonance due to its brief duration and sharply defined political content. Right-wing, centrist, and moderate left-wing dailies, such as Národní listy, Národní osvobození, and Právo lidu, ignored it entirely. In contrast, the Communist newspaper Rudé právo showed a keen interest, continuing to publicize the exhibition even after it had closed, as did the radical left-wing journals Tvorba and Levá fronta. “People accustomed to visiting the luxuriously designed halls of state-subsidized exhibitions [...] are astonished by the stark and vivid picture drawn by this remarkable exhibition. Grim diagrams scream at the viewer from hastily arranged partition walls, bearing witness to the appalling misery of the working people of Czechoslovakia,” wrote Rudé právo on September 16, 1931, continuing the following day: “As soon as you enter, your attention is caught by a series of colourful panels from which images, typography, lively and compelling diagrams, and figures gathered from an enormous range of statistical surveys on the housing conditions of the proletariat speak out at you.”

Among professional architectural journals, Stavitel provided the most extensive coverage, which can be explained by the predominance of ASLEF members within its editorial circle. The journal Stavba, likewise left-wing and until recently edited by Karel Teige, expressed regret that it could not furnish a detailed review, since "the brief period of two days during which the exhibition was open did not allow for closer study." The largely apolitical journal Architekt SIA also published a relatively sympathetic review, criticizing the exhibition for its one-sidedly Marxist conception while nevertheless praising the demonstrative force of the statistical materials on display and their occasionally witty presentation. The journal Styl maintained silence on the matter. Hannes Meyer had also wished to see the Exhibition of Proletarian Housing; he had arrived in Prague from Moscow in early October at ASLEF's invitation to deliver a lecture on Soviet architecture at the Municipal Library. He did not, however, manage to visit it before the police intervened. “It is an exemplary work of mass consciousness-raising,” he declared in the October issue of the monthly Levá fronta [Meyer 1931]: "All the more astonished is the foreign specialist by the official prohibition of the exhibition."

Rostislav Švácha

Works Cited

Dvořáková 2000: Dita Dvořáková, „Vědecké“ období v díle Jana Gillara, in: Rostislav Švácha – Soňa Ryndová – Pavla Pokorná (eds), Forma sleduje vědu: Teige, Gillar a evropský vědecký funkcionalismus 1922–1948, Praha 2000, pp. 127–191, here pp. 145–148

Meyer 1931: Hannes Meyer o policejně zakázané výstavě proletářského bydlení, Levá fronta II, 1931–1932, no. 2, p. 55

Further Reading

Anonymous author, Levá fronta v Brně, Index IV, 1932, no. 1, p. 3

Anonymous author, Výstava proletářského bydlení v Brně zakázána! Tvorba VII, 1932, no. 4, 28. 1. 1932, p. 62

Anonymous author, Navštivte dvě výstavy, Levá fronta II, 1931–1932, no. 1, p. 18

Anonymous author, Protest architektů proti zákazu Výstavy proletářského bydlení, Levá fronta II, 1931–1932, no. 3, p. 87

Anonymous author, Metody brněnské policie vůči l. f. jsou jednotvárné, Levá fronta II, 1931–1932, no. 5, p. 156

ellen [Nusim Nesis], Pražská obec „řeší“ bytovou otázku: K chystané výstavě proletářského bydlení, Tvorba VI, 1931, no. 36, 10. 9., pp. 568–569

Děldop, Sovětský svaz v obrazech, Rudé právo XII, 1931, no. 196, 23. 9., p. 4

Jan Gillar, Obytný nájemný dům, Stavitel XVI, 1937–1938, p. 5.

Karel Honzík, Ze života avantgardy, Praha 1963, pp. 197–198

Josef Kittrich – Karel Hannauer, Bytová krize: K debatám Klubu architektů o bytové otázce, Stavba X, 1931–1932, pp. 53–55

Red. děldopů, Všichni na výstavu socialistického budování, Rudé právo XII, 1931, no. 192, 18. 9., p. 5

Klaus Spechtenhauser, Sociologický funkcionalismus: K Sociologickému fragmentu bydlení Jiřího Krohy, in: Marcela Macharáčková (ed.), Jiří Kroha 1893–1974 v proměnách umění 20. století, Brno 2007, pp. 226–271