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The Movement of Revolutionary Youth was founded on 2 December 1968, a few months after the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. It emerged not only in reaction to the political events in Czechoslovakia, but it was also influenced by the students’ activism in Western Europe. The Movement united, above all, university students, but there were also intellectuals and workers among his members; Petr Uhl, Petruška Šustrová, Ivan Dejmal, Sibylle Plogstedt, Peter Lukačovič, Felipe Serrano, Pavel Šremer, Jan Frolík, Jaroslav Bašta, Jaroslav Suk, Radan Baše and many others belonged to the Movement. The Movement was influenced by the ideas of the New Left that also inspired the radical left protest movement in the West. The goal of the Movement was to eliminate bureaucracy, to abolish the state and to replace it by self-governing socialism. However, historian Jaroslav Pažout points out that rather than the ideological dimension, it was “the possibility to oppose the upcoming Normalization resolutely” that was pursued by the Movement.

The Movement’s members proclaimed the necessity of active resistance, but with regard to the situation, they realized that the most appropriate form of fighting was actually passive resistance. Movement members studied the works of New Left theoreticians; some members even personally met left militants in the West. They published leaflets and other printed matters or news about the situation in Czechoslovakia and within the Movement itself, which were dispatched abroad. Their reports were later published in French, West German and British (leftist) papers. Moreover, they also organized events, or pranks, in public spaces. The State Security managed to infiltrate the Movement and during the winter of 1969 to 1970 almost twenty members were arrested. The trial began in March 1971 and was widely covered by foreign media. Sixteen defendants were condemned; Petr Uhl received the most severe punishment – four years of imprisonment. The trial provoked protests all around the world, especially among the radical left. It was denounced by, among others, Jean Paul Sartre and Ernst Bloch. There were demonstrations for the support of the convicts in many European as well as American towns. Jaroslav Pažout notes that the importance of the Movement lied in the fact that its members “were among the first to actively oppose Husák’s Normalization regime”. The activities in the Movement were also, for many of its members, “a valuable experience for their later work in the oppositional structures”.

Museum Kampa - The Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation was founded in 1999, followed by the museum itself two years later. The ceremonial opening of the museum took place in 2003. The main purpose of the foundation is to support Czech culture, and the preservation and presentation of its collections. The museum resides in Sovovy Mlýny, a location rented from Prague for 99 years. In return, the foundation gave an important part of its collection to the city of Prague.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade was inaugurated on 20 October 1965 when the building in Ušće (part of New Belgrade) was opened to the public. Ten years earlier, in 1955, the Modern Gallery Committee had been appointed, which was to prepare the ground for the foundation of the Modern Gallery in 1958, an institution that began the work of collecting and expertly processing works of art created since the beginning of the twentieth century. Miodrag B. Protić, a painter, critic and art theorist, was appointed to head the Modern Gallery. Thanks to Protić’s commitment, enthusiasm and dedication to the idea of founding a museum of contemporary art, a competition for an architectural design for the building was announced in 1959. The competition was won by architects Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović and construction began in 1960.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade was not the first institution dedicated to collecting and presenting modern art in Yugoslavia (predecessors were the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana, the Gallery of Visual Arts in Rijeka, the City Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb), but it was the only one with a Yugoslav orientation. Insistence on its being the only exhibition of art created on the entire territory of the then Yugoslav republic met with opposition already before the Museum’s foundation. In the book, ‘Noah’s Ark’, Protić states: ‘Due to the exceptional space in which the development process took place in the domain of the image, of universal media, it was not always possible to draw a line…’.

Objections asserted that this concept would diminish space for the presentation of Serbian art and that similar institutions in Ljubljana and Zagreb did not display enough work by Serbian artists. Nevertheless, Protić defended this concept with the argument that Serbian art could not be shown in a European context without Yugoslav art.  

The next obstacles centred on objections to the building’s appearance and in general the need to construct a new building. The government offered an abandoned building to be adapted as a museum, which was unacceptable though not that easily fought off. As a compromise, the museum was given a less attractive location: a plot outside the city centre on the New Belgrade side of the River Sava.

The construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art took place between 1960 and 1965 at the time of the Cold War, of Tito’s speech against abstract art and before the student unrest of 1968. The building’s appearance was frequently targeted by political circles. There were several attempts to withdraw funding for the Museum’s construction and fittings so that in 1963 Protić was compelled to break off a study trip to the United States and return earlier in order to defend the costs of the parquet flooring in the exhibition halls and the stone cladding of the façade. According to Protić, the president of the executive council of the Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Serbia at a government session argued that the costs should be approved, saying: ‘Better that we pay this, too than tomorrow be faulted for an obviously ugly building’.

The Museum was opened in 1965, showing Yugoslav art of the twentieth century, and proceeded to collect, study, present and document art of the Yugoslav space. Thanks to the efforts and struggles of Miodrag B. Protić, one of the keenest interpreters of the progressive conception of art and most energetic actors in this field, Belgrade received the Museum of Contemporary Art. Protić’s ideas were firmly woven into Museum policy, as was the orientation towards Yugoslav and socialist progressivism.