A Czech art syndicate managed by J&T and fronted by Richard Fuxa is the most probable owner of 116 Alfons Mucha posters and 80 Bohuslav Rejnek graphics.



Richard Fuxa (carrying the cross) and Cardinal Duka launching the Bohuslav Rejnek exhibition in April this year. Fuxa says that he is the owner of 80 of Rejnek's graphic works, together with 116 original Alfons Mucha posters bought from Ivan Lendl.

The expiry of the intellectual property rights to the great majority of Alfons Mucha’s works might explain why a secret Czech art syndicate with close ties to Prague municipal politicians is the probable owner of Ivan Lendl’s collection of Mucha posters. Lendl quietly sold the collection in 2011/12 for $3.5 million US.

The end of copyright on Mucha's works might explain as well why those same municipal politicians were so eager to remove the painter's stupendous Slav Epic canvasses from a chateau in Moravia, where they had been exhibited for the last fifty years, to the capital in Prague.

Undoubtedly, the fact that most of Alfons Mucha's works are now in the public domain represents a great business opportunity. And despite objections from the painter's grandson, moving the masterpiece from the countryside to the capital’s national art gallery, where many more people will be able to see it, is understandable.

But if de facto control over the public resources and institutions used to promote these artworks had fallen into the hands of hidden private investors with business ties to municipal officials responsible for the city's art galleries, it would of course become a criminal matter.

Richter, Bufka and Srp (and Roman)

In early 2008, Prague City Councillor Milan Richter announced that it was the city’s intention, as the owner of the Slav Epic, to move the canvasses from Moravsky Krumlov to Prague. Richter dismissed the suggestion that the expiry of copyright on the canvasses in January 2010 was the reason why the city was so eager to remove the works to Prague, arguing that the paintings would still belong to the city after the expiration of the copyright. True, but the right to exploit the paintings for the purposes of merchandising would be open to all, including to the business partners of municipal politicians.

As the city’s senior councillor for culture at the time, Milan Richter was responsible for the city’s art galleries and their promotion. In 2008, he appointed Milan Bufka and Karel Srp to lead Prague’s municipal art gallery (GHMP). Srp is an art historian by profession but Bufka is a bankruptcy receiver. He was apparently chosen because of his close ties to Martin Roman, ties which go back to 2002 when Bufka was the state-appointed receiver of Skoda Plzen, the engineering conglomerate acquired by Appian in 2003. The managing director of Skoda Plzen at the time was, of course, Martin Roman.

Roman, who soon after was appointed managing director of the state-owned energy monopoly CEZ, a major customer of companies in the Skoda Plzen conglomerate, is himself an enthusiastic collector of twentieth century Czech art and a business associate of Richard Fuxa. Fuxa is the billboard entrepreneur who earlier this year claimed to be the hidden owner of Ivan Lendl’s collection of original Alfons Mucha posters as well as of 80 graphic works by Bohuslav Rejnek.

In May 2012, Bufka and Srp, as directors of the city’s art gallery, opened the exhibition of the Slav Epic canvasses in the paintings' new and what is likely to remain their permanent home, Prague’s Veletrzni Palace. Srp, who produced the catalogue for the exhibition, sits on the board of the Richard Fuxa Foundation. He is known as Martin Roman's private art curator in Prague art circles.

A few weeks after Bufka and Srp celebrated the Slav Epic’s removal to Prague, both were themselves removed as directors of GHMP. Their departure was caused by the fact that Milan Richter and his political allies in city hall had lost control of the city’s executive body. It is noteworthy that in 2009, Richter had signed an outdoor advertising contract worth $250.000 US on behalf of the city with BigBoard, apparently part-owned by Richard Fuxa.


Fuxa Mucha (and J&T Art Fond)

Visitors to the Slav Epic have been growing since its removal to Prague. However, the popularity of the most serious of Mucha’s paintings is nothing as compared to the success of the 2013 exhibition of his advertising posters staged in the city’s own Obecni dum.

The popularity of the Lendl Mucha exhibition was the result of a nationwide advertising campaign by BigBoard. The campaign allowed the public to believe that Ivan Lendl was still the owner of the posters, a dissemblance which no doubt helped contribute to the exhibition’s success. In fact, the posters had already been sold by Lendl.

For the most successful art exhibition ever staged in the Czech Republic, it is remarkable how all those involved claim to know nothing whatsoever about the identity of the owner of the art exhibited.

If representatives of the state- and municipal-owned corporate sponsors of the poster exhibition and the directors of the publicly-funded institutions where the posters were first exhibited and are now stored are to be believed, none knowingly dealt with the real owner of the posters.

All have stated that their legal involvement with the Lendl Mucha collection is limited to the contracts they each hold with exhibition's organiser, a Czech limited liability company called BigMedia. BigMedia is majority-owned by BigBoard Praha a.s.

No one really knows for sure who owns the shares. BigBoard's annual report for 2013 states that, to the company's best knowledge, the owners are JOJ Media House, a joint-stock company owned by the J&T lawyer, Richard Flimel (60%); Richard Fuxa (20%); and Touzimsky Media, a joint-stock company owned by a Swiss-registered nominee called Touzimsky Kapital AG (20%).

In early 2014, under pressure from the media, Fuxa stepped forward to claim that he was in fact the secret owner of the Lendl posters. This remarkable revelation appears to be a rather unremarkable attempt to hide the identity of the true owners.

CEZ and Prazske sluzby, the first majority owned by the Czech state, the second majority owned by the City of Prague (Prazske sluzby collects the capital’s rubbish), were both corporate sponsors of the Lendl Mucha exhibition. Neither is obliged nor willing to disclose how much it handed over, but both handed it over to BigMedia, according to Vlastimil Jezek, the city appointed director of Prague’s Obecni dum where the exhibition took place.

Jezek offered no information about the sponsorship of the exhibition, stating that this was all handled directly between BigMedia and the sponsors themselves. Nor did he offer an opinion on who actually owns the posters. He was quite unwilling to disclose any details of the financial relationship between Obecni dum and BigMedia. He merely reiterated that Obecni dum's legal partner was only ever BigMedia.

GASK is Central Bohemia’s regional public gallery based in Kutna Hora. Jana Sorfova, the director of GASK, confirmed that the gallery has a contract with BigMedia for storing the posters in its depository for an unlimited period. GASK is paid a fee by BigMedia for doing so. But she was unable to shed any light on who might actually own the posters.

Neither Jezek nor Sorfova appear to have had any contact with the Richard Fuxa Foundation, reinforcing the suspicion that the foundation has never owned the posters, contrary to claims made by Fuxa earlier this year. Czech law requires the foundation to have a supervisory board if its property is valued at more than $250.000 US. The foundation has no such board, in spite of the fact that the Mucha posters have a market value of fourteen times that amount. Instead, it has a so-called ‘revizor’, or at least it had until Marina Votrubova of Unicredit Bank resigned her post (when exactly is not yet clear).

Without firm evidence that he or his foundation is the legal owner of the posters, it would be more sensible to take Fuxa’s claims to own the collection with a large pinch of salt. So who, then, is Fuxa hiding? The only entity that appears to have any meaningful legal relationship to the Lendl Mucha posters is BigMedia. And the entity appearing to have the most meaningful relationship to BigMedia is J&T, a local financial group with close ties to Martin Roman.

The most probable owners of the poster collection are J&T's clients (among whom are apparently numbered local politicians and the former managers of state-owned utilities). This would help explain why J&T Banka was the general partner of the poster exhibition. J&T has its own offshore vehicle for investing in artworks. J&T Art Fond belongs to the Cypriot-registered J&T Holdings & Invest Limited.

From refuse collectors to cardinals

The investment case for acquiring Ivan Lendl’s Alfons Mucha poster collection must have been made more convincing by the fact that investors could be sure that public resources would be channeled into promoting an artist most of whose intellectual property is now in the public domain.

Could it be that these investors included a sprinkling of former municipal politicians that control the city's art galleries and senior managers of publicly-owned companies that sponsor them? And are these the same investors behind the promotion of Bohuslav Rejnek, 80 of whose graphic works have just been acquired by Richard Fuxa and are now being exhibited by the National Gallery of Prague (once again, Karel Srp is the curator of the exhibition)?

Rejnek, like Mucha, is now undergoing the BigBoard treatment, with billboards lining the nation’s every motorway and tasteless publicity stunts involving mock crucifixions in clouds of dry ice. Only the merchandise has changed. This time, Fuxa is flogging, not decorative Mucha jewellery, but a commemorative bible illustrated by Rejnek and on sale at $385 US. This is even more expensive than the absurd hagiography of AHAE by the former director of the Prague National Gallery, Milan Knizak. AHAE was the artistic alias of Yoo Byung-eun, the South Korean swindler and owner of the ferry that capsized killing 300 schoolchildren (see here).

Fuxa enlisted the support of the country’s energy monopoly and Prague’s refuse collector to promote his investment in Alfons Mucha. This time, he has Cardinal Dominik Duka to help with the merchandising. Does the cardinal know who actually owns the original artworks?