The Attack against Czechoslovakia

Jan Lauda did his monumental ceramic relief The Attack against Czechoslovakia in cooperation with painter Jan Bauch for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939. A more expressive study housed by the National Gallery in Prague is approximately half its size. The displayed sculpture allegory of a no longer existing (now occupied) state with the theme of an unequal fight between animals in nature reacted to the dramatic political events of the late 1930s. The helpless doe knocked to the ground by a beast of prey was an emotional parable of the violence perpetrated by Nazi Germany on the Czechoslovak people and the state after the Munich Agreement.