Publishing house

The Publishing Department of the National Gallery Prague is a specially created publishing house that carries out the Gallery’s publishing activities in close cooperation with art historians, curators, lecturers, collections, and the NGP Library. The strongly academic output is logical given the Department’s specialisation. In addition to traditional printed materials—especially exhibition and collection inventory catalogues, guides, professional periodicals, conference compendia, artist monographs—it publishes academic literature on the fine arts and cognate fields (art theory and philosophy, museology, art history archives, etc.), popularising publications about NGP’s collections, and children’s books. The Department’s publishing output has grown considerably in recent years due to the increase in corresponding activities of NGP staff (exhibitions, science and research, education, etc.). Many of the books are issued in several language versions, which makes them suitable for interlibrary publication exchanges; they also show the advanced level of NGP as an art institution.

Publications issued by the National Gallery Prague may be purchased via our online shop and the Gallery’s bookstores.

Publishing Plan 2024

In the late 1990s, the NGP’s publishing activity followed the same trend as ever. Due to its organisational structure at the time, professional and technical work was carried out in the individual collections. The 1997 reorganisation saw the dissolution of the NGP Central Publishing Department, resulting in a heterogeneity of edition content, and especially of style and execution. The 1999 appointment of Professor Milan Knížák as the new General Director led to propositions that the NGP publishing policy be managed from within a single unit. Until then, every collection created its own publishing series without taking into consideration the NGP image as a whole. It was not to be an automatic return to past practices: a brand-new concept was put forward to establish a specialised publishing house. The NGP had good conditions for that—it had already been involved in printed material publishing before, and its collections had always constituted an extraordinarily sizeable source of graphic material suitable for reproduction, which had not been used effectively in its entirety. The NGP agreed that there were no publishing houses in the Czech Republic with a systematic focus on academic as well as amateur and popular art literature. As a result, the NGP decided to fill the gap by establishing a specialised publishing house on 2 February 2002.