ARTSCHUL Prague, formerly the Robert Guttmann Gallery, is an exhibition space of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It is located at U Staré školy 3, in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, close to the Spanish Synagogue.

The name ARTSCHUL connects the gallery with the memory of the Altschul, the Old School or Old Shul. According to the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Altschul stood in this area from the early thirteenth century until 1686 and is the first reliably documented synagogue in Prague.

ARTSCHUL and the Altschul Memory

The topography of the surrounding street preserves this older layer of Jewish Prague. U Staré školy means “At the Old School”. The same street was formerly known in German and Yiddish as Altschulgasse.

This name is important because the modern gallery belongs to a place already marked by one of the earliest documented institutions of Jewish communal life in Prague. The present function is museological and educational, but the name ARTSCHUL deliberately recalls the older synagogue landscape of Josefov.

Robert Guttmann and the Gallery

The gallery was originally named after Robert Guttmann, a Prague Jewish painter associated with naïve art, Zionist circles and the visual memory of Jewish Prague. Guttmann was born in 1880, deported from Prague to the Łódź ghetto on 16 October 1941, and murdered there on 14 March 1942.

The Robert Guttmann Gallery opened in 2001 as a modern exhibition venue of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Its first exhibition was dedicated to Guttmann’s work and presented paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts and archival material connected with his life.

Museum Collections and Reconstruction

The venue covers about 80 square metres and was designed for short-term exhibitions from the museum’s collections. Its controlled light, temperature and humidity conditions allow the display of sensitive materials, including parchments, old printed books, historic textiles and works on paper.

The gallery has presented exhibitions on Jewish life, the persecution of Bohemian and Moravian Jews during the Second World War, Jewish monuments in the Czech Republic and Jewish themes in contemporary visual art.

The Jewish Museum has listed the space as closed for reconstruction. After renovation, ARTSCHUL Prague is planned to function as a gallery and educational centre for short-term exhibitions from the museum’s collections.