Collections and Archive Department

This collection was set up in 2006 and it currently contains almost 4,000 original collection items.

The primary focus of this collection is contemporary work (since the 1990s) and the work of people who significantly shaped the visual artistry of Czech theatre since 1945. It mainly contains work that was created by Czech scenic and costume designers and, in some rare cases, puppetry artists working for theatres in the Czech Republic and abroad.

The collection mainly contains original scenic and costume designs, created using various artistic techniques (e.g. tempera, pastel, ink, watercolour, chalk), scale models of stage designs, and drawings, which together capture the creative process. The artistic quality of an item and its significance from a theatre arts perspective are the criteria that are ideally taken into account when new acquisitions for the collection are being considered. The collection contains work by a number of important figures, including: Vlastislav Hofman, František Tröster, Josef Svoboda, Jan Sládek, Otakar Schindler, Luboš Hrůza, Jan Vančura, Jaroslav Malina, Miroslav Melena, Marta Roszkopfová, Jana Zbořilová, Jana Preková, Zuzana Štefunková Rusínová, Petr Lébl, and many others.

This collection has gradually developed since the Theatre Institute was founded in 1959, when scenographic artefacts began to be documented in photographs. This was performed in cooperation with the scenic designers or as the documentation of exhibitions in stage design (e.g. national showcases, exhibitions, the Prague Quadrennial).

The scenographic artefacts that form part of this collection can be divided into two groups – reproductions that the ATI has only in digital format and items acquired directly from the people who created them, or from their heirs, but that do not belong in the Scenographic Collection. These include stage and costume designs, scale-models of stage designs, sketches, technical drawings, puppets, and photographs of completed sets or costumes. Because these artefacts are not subject to collection criteria, in some cases they are able to provide a more comprehensive idea of the overall visual component of a production.

The Photography Collection comprises more than 490,000 photographs of productions staged at Czech theatres since 1945 (positives, negatives, diapositives, digital photographs). The processing and digitisation of the collection began in 2010 and was made possible thanks to the support of Norway Grants – EEA Grant. The collection includes work by major photographers such as Václav Chochola, Karel Drbohlav, Jaromír Svoboda, Jaroslav Krejčí, Josef Koudelka, Viktor Kronbauer, Bohdan Holomíček, Josef Ptáček, Martin Špelda, Patrik Borecký, and many others.

Data are made accessible with the consent of the author or the licence-holder. If consent is not provided, researchers can only access the materials in the Reading Room at the ATI. Information about the production and the cast and figures involved in it are gradually added to accompany each photograph. The Photolibrary (unlike the Photography Collection with its 300,000 collected items) contains both photographs that are owned by the ATI and photographs that (having been taken within just over the past decade) exist only in electronic format.

This collection contains more than 5,000 artefacts, each one of which represents a fusion of the function of art, promotion, and information. The collected posters include work created by such important figures as Libor Fára (for Theatre on the Balustrade and the Drama Club), Pavel Brom (for Theatre behind the Gate), Jan Schmid (for Studio Ypsilon), Adolf Born, and Josef Flejšar (for the National Theatre). In the current era of online communication the theatre poster has somewhat lost its original purpose, but there are theatres that have not abandoned them yet – such as the Heroes’ Studio in Prague.

The theatre posters in this collection meaningfully complement the scenographic and photographic artefacts in the other collections and are also important evidence of our theatre history. There is no question that the posters need to be preserved. Their main value is as documentary and historical sources, but many of them are also of clear and in some cases even extraordinary artistic value. They also make excellent exhibition items. The collection also contains artistically valuable posters that were created by scenographers, such as Jaroslav Malina, Marta Roszkopfová, and Petr Matásek. Preserving these posters helps the effort to comprehensively document how different artists contributed to a production.

ATI performs, among other things, the function of a memory institution. It collects, processes and makes available documents on the artistic activities of Czech theatres, theatre companies and artists, especially in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The archival holdings in the Collections and Archives Department are continuously linked to the holdings of the Information and Documentation Department. They contain documentary and iconographic materials of a private or institutional nature (including photographs, promotional materials, recorded media, etc.). The documents are mainly of a non-official nature. They tell mainly about specific creative activities of artists, theatres and individual companies, contemporary events, exhibitions and, last but not least, ATI activities (e.g. PQ, Theatre Night). The enclosed alphabetical inventory is divided into three parts (personalities, theatres, varieties) for better orientation. All holdings have accessibility information, larger holdings are accompanied by a short description.

Fund inventory (in Czech)

Researchers can access the collections only in the IDU study rooms and by prior arrangement; borrowing is not possible..

Administrator of the fund:
Milan Černý
milan.cerny@idu.cz