Jan Viktor Mládek

Jan Viktor Mládek (7 December 1911 – 7 August 1989) was initially a Czechoslovak, then an American economist of Polish-Czech origin, governor and one of the executive directors of the International Monetary Fund, art collector and patron of Central European art.

Life 1911–1948 Jan Viktor Mládek was born into a Czech-Polish family in what was then Austrian-Hungarian Galicia. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, the family moved to Prague.

After graduating from the Smíchov real gymnasium (now Gymnázium Na Zatlance) he began studying law in Prague and completed his studies at the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University in Brno, where he obtained his doctorate in law in 1936. He also completed two semesters of medicine, but his deeper interest in economics and philosophy led him to the University of Economics in Prague. He worked briefly in the research department of the National Bank and before the war he left to study with Henri Bergson at the Sorbonne in Paris. In England, he studied at Cambridge University under Bertrand Russell and John M. Keynes, with whom he later worked closely during the war on plans for the post-war financial reconstruction and stabilization of European countries.

The outbreak of World War II found Mládek in France, where he enlisted in the French Army as artillery officer. After its defeat and evacuation to England, he was assigned to the Czechoslovak Ministry of Finance in exile in London. Its finance minister, Ladislav Feierabend, tried to persuade the president in exile, Edvard Beneš, to establish a Czechoslovak National Bank in exile, but he was unsuccessful. Beneš objected to the proposed members, people associated with the economic system of the First Republic – such as Antonín Basch, a staunch advocate of liberal economics and professor at the University of Chicago – but above all, he supported a change in the economic system after the end of the war and envisaged a greater role for the state.

Feierabend therefore established only a monetary and banking department within the Ministry of Finance, which he entrusted to Mládek.

The Czechoslovak government signed the IMF agreement (Articles of Agreement of the IMF) with the first group of countries on 27 December 1945, making Czechoslovakia a founding member. Among the twelve executive directors of the IMF, Czechoslovak representative Jan Viktor Mládek, who was then head of the currency and banking division of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Finance, was elected in the first elections on 6 May 1946. As governor of IMF (Fund Committee on Rules and Regulations), Mládek represented the interests not only of Czechoslovakia, but also of Poland and Yugoslavia. In the US, at the request of President Beneš, he also worked on the adoption of the Marshall Plan. From 1947, Jan Viktor Mládek represented Czechoslovakia also in the United Nations. At the request of US President Lyndon B. Johnson, he helped resolve the financial and monetary problems of Southeast Asian countries. From 1964, he headed the IMF's Central Banking Service.

In 1955 in Paris, he met Meda Sokolová when she came to ask him for a financial contribution for her publishing house. Shortly thereafter, she divorced her husband, Belgian nobleman Remi Antoine Joseph de Mûelenaer. In 1956 Meda began studying fine arts at L’École du Louvre at the Sorbonne. In the same year, she met František Kupka, who was brought to her attention by Mládek's friend, the famous Parisian antiquarian Jacques Kugel.

In 1960, Jan Mládek was called back to the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. and Meda followed him there to marry him. In Washington D.C., she studied American literature and art at George Washington University and later at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Together with her husband, she began building an art collection, the quality of which soon became widely known thanks to the numerous visitors to the Mládek's home. Their friends and acquaintances included the Peroutkas and the Brzezinskis, Henry Kissinger, George Soros and Madeleine Albright. Meda Mládková began running a social salon, to which she invited artists according to her taste. The Mládek´s did not hesitate to make personal sacrifices to acquire certain works. In order to purchase one of František Kupka's key work, Cathedral, they sold their house in Georgetown.

In 1969, Meda Mládková organized an exhibition of Czechoslovak art in Washington, D.C. The works were purchased by Jan Viktor Mládek for his office and for the International Monetary Fund. The Mládek couple built up an extensive art collection, which they presented in 1987 at the exhibition "Expressiv: Central European Art since 1960" at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. A little later, the collection became the basis of their private Foundation and the Museum Kampa. and Stanislav Kolíbal at the Livingstone-Clermont Gallery, and accompanied Jan Mládek on his first trip to Czechoslovakia since emigrating in 1948.

After retiring in 1977, he worked intensively on plans to rebuild the Czechoslovak economy, but died on 7 August 1989, just before the fall of communist regime in November 1989.

In 1995, Dr. Jan V. Mládek was awarded the Medal of Merit, First Class, in memoriam.