Anna Habánová - Between Vienna and Liberec – On Art Exhibitions in the City beneath Ještěd at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Liberec—or, more accu­rate­ly, Reichenberg—grew into a bustling indus­tri­al cen­ter in the sec­ond half of the 19th cen­tu­ry. Its wealth­i­er res­i­dents built a gar­den city, at the heart of which a new muse­um was opened. This insti­tu­tion, the only one of its kind local­ly, offered its audi­ence exhi­bi­tions of fine art. The inspi­ra­tion for these exhi­bi­tions came from Vien­na. The lec­ture will sum­ma­rize the lat­est infor­ma­tion on the nature of the Liberec exhi­bi­tions, as well as the most impor­tant fig­ures who shaped the tastes of the local elite.

Anna Habánová is a promi­nent art his­to­ri­an. From 2002 to 2021, she served as cura­tor of col­lec­tions and exhi­bi­tions at the Region­al Gallery in Liberec. She is cur­rent­ly an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Depart­ment of His­to­ry, Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Liberec, and a cura­tor at NisaFac­to­ry in Jablonec nad Nisou. Her research focus­es pri­mar­i­ly on German-speaking artists from Bohemia, Moravia, and Sile­sia. Togeth­er with Ivo Habán and Hele­na Musilová, she real­ized the unique exhi­bi­tion project New Realisms (Gallery of the Cap­i­tal City of Prague, March 27–August 25, 2024). For the first time, they pre­sent­ed side by side not only real­ist paint­ings and pho­tographs but also film, sculp­ture, and adver­tis­ing from inter­war Czecho­slo­va­kia, offer­ing view­ers a com­plete­ly new per­spec­tive on this period.