The End of the Black-and-White Era is not a
comprehensive title for the years 1939–2021 but rather a slogan summarizing an
approach that seeks to avoid premature ideological appraisal of the surveyed
material from this often painful time. The aim is to show that art has always
included multiple and parallel conceptions of artistic quality. The basic
polarities of the art of those times – official and unofficial, abstract and
figurative, formal and socially engaged – mutually conditioned each other’s
existence but almost never existed as black-and-white maximums. The
chronological development thus lets visitors observe how quickly the idea of
quality changed over time, even for individual artists. The permanent
exhibition presents art as testimony of the times: the result of not only
purely authorial but also social, political, and economic forces. It consists
of more than 300 works solely from the collection of the NGP without any loans.
It also offers a methodology that is not based on a hierarchical selection of
the very best art, but on an attempt to understand the motives behind what art
was being made at the time and why; this is complemented by examples of
exhibitions as well as acquisition stories.
