Czech art collector Meda Mladkova dies aged 102

Czech emigrant art collector Meda Mladkova, who supported artists in communist Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, died on Tuesday at the age of 102, her foundation announced.

From the 1960s, Mladkova purchased works by modern Czech artists suffering under the communist regime imposed by Moscow and organized exhibitions and scholarships for them.

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," Jiri Pospisil, director of the Jan and Meda Mladek Foundation, said in a tweet on Tuesday.

Mladkova left Czechoslovakia for Switzerland after the Communists came to power in 1948. From 1955 to 1960, she studied art history in Paris, where she founded a publishing house and began collecting paintings of his compatriot Frantisek Kupka, who also lived in France.

In 1960 Mladkova moved to Washington with her husband Jan Mladek, an economist working for the International Monetary Fund.

They buy more than 200 paintings by Kupka, a pioneer of abstract art.

In the late 1960s, Mladkova began to return to Czechoslovakia and collect works by local artists.

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Mladkova definitely returned to her native country after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. She donated her entire collection to the city of Prague after her husband's death the same year.

His foundation turned a historic building in central Prague into a Kampa Museum with a permanent exhibition of Kupka's works.

She was made Commander of the French National Order of Merit in 2012.