Assimilation Through Art: The Modernist Collection of Marica and Jan Vilcek

In the mid-1960s, art enthusiasts Marica and Jan Vilcek saw little of the modernist artworks being produced in Europe and the Americas. Coming of age in communist Czechoslovakia, they lived in a place where intellectual ideas, abstract art, and art that challenged the status quo were discouraged. Instead, the Czech communist regime encouraged realism and Social Realism over abstraction and promoted works of propaganda in service to the ideals of communism. It was a frustrating experience for Marica, an art historian, who relied on her brother, then living in New York City, to send her reproductions of modernist works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions.