Museum Kampa & David Černý's Babies
Why is it significant?
Walk across the lawn towards the old mill on the riverbank and you will meet them: three enormous bronze babies, crawling across the grass on hands and knees. Children climb on their backs. Tourists pose beside them.
Key Facts
| Place | Museum Kampa & David Černý's Babies |
|---|---|
| Address | U Sovových mlýnů 2, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08400, 14.40850 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Secret Lesser Town: Kampa, the Devil's Stream & the Embassy Garden of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk across the lawn towards the old mill on the riverbank and you will meet them: three enormous bronze babies, crawling across the grass on hands and knees. Children climb on their backs. Tourists pose beside them. And then people look at their faces and fall silent, because where a face should be, each baby has a flat, vertical slot, like a barcode or a coin slot.
They are the work of David Černý, Prague's most provocative sculptor, the man behind the walking Trabant at the start of this walk. The originals were made to crawl up the Žižkov television tower in 2000, a deliberately absurd answer to a building many Praguers hated. These three came down to earth, and here they ask their own uncomfortable question: are these babies, or products?
Behind them stands Museum Kampa, in the old Sova's Mills, a mill complex that worked on this spot for centuries. It opened in 2003 and holds the collection of Jan and Meda Mládek, Czech émigrés who spent decades abroad buying the work of Central European artists the communist regime ignored or banned. Its treasures include paintings by František Kupka, one of the pioneers of abstract art, and the sculptures of the Czech cubist Otto Gutfreund.
Meda Mládková lived to be over a hundred. While the borders were closed, she helped artists behind the Iron Curtain by buying their work, and after 1989 she brought the whole collection home and gave it to her country. The flood of 2002 struck the mill just before the museum was due to open, and it opened anyway, a year later. That stubbornness feels very Kampa.
Before you leave, walk to the riverside terrace for one of the best views of Charles Bridge, almost from water level. Then leave the island westwards, over the little bridge across the Čertovka, into Všehrdova street. At the end of it stands a palace that was built on war profits... and later belonged to a movement of gymnasts.