Meda Mládková

Marie Magdalena Františka "Meda" Mládková ( Sokolová, 8 September 1919 – 3 May 2022) was a Czech art collector. Her husband, Jan Viktor Mládek (1911–1989), was an economist and a governor of the IMF. Having spent several years in exile, she returned to Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Early life Marie Magdalena Františka Sokolová was born on 8 September 1919 within the premises of the Zákupy castle, where her father was working as a brewer. Her family later decided to move to Brandýs nad Labem. She moved to Switzerland in 1946 to study Economics in Geneva, where she earned her Ph.D. Together with other exiles from Czechoslovakia, she published a magazine called . By February 1948, she decided not to return to Czechoslovakia. She consequently went to Paris, where she studied Art History at the Sorbonne and at L'Ecole du Louvre between 1955 and 1960.

Exile During her time in Paris, Mládková founded the first Czechoslovak exile publishing company called Edition Sokolova. One of its first published titles was a volume of verse by Ivan Blatný, and the writings of Ferdinand Peroutka. and in 1945 became one of the first Governors of the International Monetary Fund. as well as 240 productions by Jiří Kolář and 17 sculptures by Otto Gutfreund. one of which was Localization of Graphic Motifs II. She later donated this work to the National Gallery of Art in 1984. Mládková also arranged a Kupka retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1975. The Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation has in its care a collection of Central European Modern art, and artworks by František Kupka and Otto Gutfreund. The price of the collection is today virtually inestimable. It consists of 215 studies, drawings and paintings, and ranks alongside the world's most comprehensive collections of its kind.

Mládková was bestowed a state decoration by Václav Havel in 1999.