International exhibitions as an instrument of domestic cultural policy: how Baroque art came to be honoured in socialist Czechoslovakia

At the end of the 1960s the artistic tradition of the Baroque period in Bohemia had gained new acceptance and the established schema for interpreting its history had been revised. This essay asks how it came to this turn. It therefore pursues, on the one hand, the sequence of events in its most important stages and, on the other hand, sketches the gradual reinterpretation of Baroque art as ‘popular’ cultural legacy or at least one compatible with the State’s postulated self-image as a ‘society of the people’. It is argued that this approach to Baroque art derived from a synergy of deliberate strategies of cultural policy and discursive adaptations. The study, moreover, presents a case study for how largely scholarly conceptions and models of interpretation can be dependent on extra-scholarly circumstances and interests – which should by no means be regarded as specific to socialist or communist regimes