Trade Fair Palace

Museum · Holešovice (Prague 7)Prague,Czechia

A 1928 Prague trade hall, burnt out and empty for seventeen years, now the national modern art gallery on tiers around one vast atrium.

The Trade Fair Palace is one enormous glass-roofed atrium with tier upon tier of galleries running up around it, and the National Gallery's modern art hangs on them. You come in at the bottom and the building goes up in front of you, floor above floor, before you have looked at a single picture. On the walls is Czech and international painting and sculpture from the nineteenth century onward, the collection the country had nowhere large enough to show. Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs put it up between 1925 and 1928, and it gave them roughly thirteen and a half thousand square metres of floor. Then the fairs moved out, offices moved in, and in 1974 it burned. It stood as an empty shell for seventeen years, and the doors did not open again until December 1995. What the rebuild did not touch is the shape. The tiers you climb are the levels the fair was laid out on, and nothing about them was designed with a painting in mind.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Pick two floors, not five — the collection runs from the nineteenth century to the present across an enormous shed, and trying to take it in one pass is how people end up remembering nothing but corridors.
This is painting and sculpture only — glass, furniture and applied art belong to a different museum in this city, so do not come here expecting the Bohemian design story.
One building of several — the National Gallery is spread across the city, and a ticket bought here does not open the medieval collection in the convent or the other houses.

Things to do

1
Stand at the bottom of the atrium and look up
Go into the main well and put your back to the wall. Galleries stack above you to a glass roof, with the openings arranged so that people on every level are visible from every other. This was designed so that a fair could be read at a glance, and it works exactly as well with visitors as it did with exhibits.
2
Follow one century up one staircase
Pick a floor with the nineteenth-century collection and work forward in time as you climb. The building is big enough to let the change from salon painting to the avant-garde happen at walking pace, which is not possible anywhere else in the country. Two floors is plenty; the shed will still be there.
3
Find the joins in the rebuild
Look at where surfaces meet: original concrete columns and beams against handrails, glazing and fittings from the reconstruction of the 1980s and 90s. The building is a 1920s skeleton with a late-century interior fitted into it, and once you start noticing the seam you read the whole hall differently.