Meda Mládek bought this collection of František Kupka’s work, assembled by an American art historian, at the end of 2011, and at the start of the following year she transported it to the Czech Republic, where it was received with great interest by the media and the general public. The collection has several oil paintings and numerous drawings and studies that offer a unique insight into this remarkable painter’s creative thought process. The story of how Lilli Lonngren Anders became interested in Kupka’s work is similar to Meda Mládek’s own story. Lilli Lonngren was working as a research assistant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A conversation with the museum’s famous director Alfred H. Barr Jr. revealed that they were both interested in František Kupka; in Barr’s opinion he was probably the world’s first abstract painter, and he asked Lilli Lonngren to go to Paris to research this with the painter himself. So in Paris in the 1950s both Meda and Lilli were visiting Kupka, who was near the end of his life, and both began collecting his work (Meda was of course successful in acquiring a number of truly remarkable works). Many years later Meda persuaded Lilli to sell her collection to the museum in Prague.

Current acquisitions focus largely on the years since 1960, and particularly artists living outside Prague whose paths for various reasons, especially logistical ones, did not cross Meda Mládek’s. This has brought artists such as Jan Wojnar, Dalibor Chatrný, Rudolf Hliněnský and others into the collections. Exhibitions and acquisitions have also covered works by artists who emigrated after the Prague Spring came to a violent end, and there is a well-balanced collection of works by Karel Trinkiewitz, Karel Novosad, František Kyncl and other artists. Other important recent acquisitions include several works by Jaroslav Vožniak, René Roubíček and Vladimír Kopecký, as well as Adriena Šimotová, Zbyšek Sion, Rudolf Němec and many others.