Did you know that the Museum of Ethnography formerly gave home to the Palace of Justice? After that it gave home to the National Gallery, and then in 1974 the Museum of Ethnography moved into the building. In this exhibition named “Metamorphoses: From Palace of Justice to Museum” you can see the building and its development, changes and beautiful architecture.
From Palace of Justice to Museum
Museum of Ethnography
September 30, 2010 – June 30th, 2011
The Worlds of Széchenyi
Hungarian National Museum
October 8, 2010 – March 6, 2011
XIX. Art and Nation: Image and Self-Image
Hungarian National Gallery
November 5th, 2010 – April 3rd, 2011
Pictures and videos from the disaster spread around the world within hours, and most people have heard of it, at least those watching news and reading newspapers.
Now visitors to the Hungarian National Museum can get more insight into the disaster by visiting the exhibition “Relief exhibition – Red Sludge Catastrophe 2010“. Here you can see photos, videos, childrens’s drawings of the catastrophe, and protective clothing and accessories of the volunteers. The entrance fee is 500 Ft, which goes directly to helping the victims in Devecser.
Relief exhibition – Red Sludge Catastrophe 2010
Hungarian National Museum
November 10 – December 12
The name of the newest temporary exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery is named: “Munkácsy: The Christ Trilogy”. This is a brilliant exhibition showing some of the best known and most beautiful paintings made by any Hungarian painter throughout history. During the preparations for the exhibtion there were some problems getting the giant paintings into the National Gallery, and one of the paintings was almost destroyed when the crane carrying it into the gallery fell over and destroyed a car as it tried to lift the painting into the museum. Fortunately the painting survived without a scrath!
This exhibtion will for sure be a big hit, and one we can warmly recommend everyone. Check it out!
Munkácsy: The Christ Trilogy
National Gallery
November 23, 2010 – April 30, 2011
Press release:
Mihály Munkácsy undoubtedly reached the pinnacle of his career with The Christ Trilogy, even though the three paintings were only exhibited for the first time together almost 100 years after his death. When Munkácsy started to paint Christ before Pilate (Krisztus Pilátus előtt), in the summer of 1880, he was already working with one of the most successful art-dealers in Paris, Charles Sedelmeyer.
Sedelmeyer’s ambition to make Munkácsy known worldwide proved to be successful. It was he who regularly organised international exhibitions for Munkácsy’s newest works, and negotiated the sale of both commercial and reproductive rights of the paintings. Therefore the big Christ painting became thecentre of the international attention even before its completion. After showing in Paris, England and Vienna, it was exhibited in Budapest at the beginning of 1882 when over 80 thousand people went to see it.
Munkácsy had already made drafts for a new Christ painting in 1881. The interesting thing about Golgotha was that it was finished by 1884, and the artist modelled the crucified Saviour after himself. We know this from contemporary photos, where the Marquis de Susa took a snap shot of the ‘crucified’ Munkácsy. The exhibition of Golgotha in Paris, Budapest and England attracted hundreds of thousands of people, just like the exhibition of the first Christ painting. The third picture of the trilogy was expected by most people to be a Resurrection scene, however Munkácsy was too busy with new orders throughout the 1880s.In 1895 he painted the altarpiece of the Andrássy Mausoleum in Tőketerebes (in current day Slovakia), on the basis of the central motif of Golgotha, but by this time his creative power had become very weak. Fighting illness, the artist completed the third part of the trilogy, Ecce Homo.
Despite the religious nature of Munkácsy’s Christ paintings, it would be difficult to imagine them as altarpieces, and instead they should be considered as socio-cultural genre compositions. The public was mesmerized by the enormous size, the hype surrounding their exhibition and the nature of the biblical events depicted. The secret to the works’ religious radiance is that Munkácsy brought the Saviour within touching distance, and drew the public into Christ’s story of suffering. He created a modern picture of Christ, that was tailored to the demands of the modern man searching for new forms of stimulation. Munkácsy provided bothreligious experience and mental pleasure. Even today, when competing with all sorts of multimedia, the paintings still have a strong effect on the onlooker.
The first two parts of the trilogy were bought by John Wanamaker during Munkácsy’s 1886-87 trip to the United States, and the paintings were almost permanently exhibited in his department store in Philadelphia. The works left the Wanamaker family’s ownership in 1988 and are now owned by a Canadian and an American-Hungarian. Ecce Homo was bought by Frigyes Déri in 1914, who then donated it to the Déri Museum of Debrecen in 1930, which he founded himself. The three paintings were exhibited together for the first time in 1995 when the first two parts of the trilogy came to the museum on loan. While the Déri Museum is being renovated, the National Gallery is giving a home to the trilogy where for the first time the main compositions are accompanied by drafts,studies and smaller sized versions.
A new temporary exhibition was launched at the Museum of Fine Arts at the Heroes Square in Budapest yesterday. In my eyes this seems to be a quite family friendly exhibition, as the paintings made by Fernando Botero looks both funny, interesting and quite cool.
Fernando Botero is a Latin American contemporary painter.
Fernando Botero’s paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts
September 30 – February 20, 2011
Press release about the exhibition:
Rotund and voluptuous forms, characteristically simple and expressive figures, people, animals and objects dominate the works of Colombian-born Fernando Botero. The language of his colourful and often luminous works is understandable for all; he opens up a seemingly distant Latin American reality and transforms it into a familiar world. His works are linked by the underlying quality of universality and his use of the most elemental gestures renders his ideas of the world and its various phenomena visible. Botero is a productive artist and a leading figure of contemporary art whose works can be found in public collections in countries across the world including Japan, Russia, Germany, Finland, Italy, Colombia and the United States. A selection of the masterpieces of the last twenty years can be seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest between 30 September 2010 and 23 January 2011.
Some sixty, mostly large oil paintings and sculptures will be presented at the exhibition, allowing an insight into a unique world that can be described by a kind of striving for monumentality and timelessness rooted in the ancient Greco-Latin tradition, while demonstrating how the artist draws inspiration and pays tribute to the classical European masters and invites visitors to the land of Latin America throbbing with life and colour.
Based on their themes, the paintings can be grouped into still-lifes, paraphrases, as well as the places and events of life in Latin America: everyday streets, colourful houses, the circus and bullfighting arenas. The concept of the exhibition is not exclusively built around a thematic arrangement of the works since it also focuses on the precedents that appear in the painting of the Colombian artist.
A new exhbition has just been opened in the Museum of Fine Arts. It is named “Nuda Veritas. Gustav Klimt and the Origins of the Vienna Secession 1895–1905.” This will for sure be an exhibition bringing many tourists to Budapest, but it will also draw people from Hungary to Budapest. On the official homepage of the Museum of Fine Arts we can read that “the spiritual leader and first president of the Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt, will be accorded a highlighted place in the exhibition, which will not only display his significant paintings, such as Nuda Veritas – “naked truth”, included in the title of the exhibition, but also a group of his drawings evocative of a work that has not survived but which represented an important phase of his artistic career: the three murals symbolising the faculties of the University of Vienna. ”
I guess it is only to get to the museum and check it out, at least if you are interested.
Nuda Veritas. Gustav Klimt and the Origins of the Vienna Secession 1895–1905
Museum of Fine Arts
September 23 – January 9 (2011)
An exhibition named “Duodji – Sámi Handicrafts” was just opened in the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. The exhibition will be available between August 8 and November 28, and is connected with the exhibition “How we see the Finns“, also available until November 28, 2010.
Duodji – Sámi Handicrafts
Museum of Ethnography
August 9 – November 28 (2010)
More about the exhibition (press release):
Ilmari Tapiola (b. 1955; Sámi name Gáva-Jon Ilmar) comes from a village of Kaava (Gávva) on the Teno River (Deatnu) in the municipality of Utsjoki. Tapiola is both a reindeer herder, an entrepreneur in the field of fishing tourism and a maker of handicraft.
When he was young, the prospects of Sámi handicraft were poor, especially as concerns the handicraft made by men. Industrial products had replaced the tools, dishes, containers and other objects in which things were kept that had been traditionally made at home, and there were only few masters of Sámi handicraft left.
Ilmari Tapiola learnt the basic skills of Sámi handicraft on the courses held at Christian Folk High School of Inari, where his teachers included Ilmari Laiti and Juhan Rist. In 1974, Tapiola left – with two other Sámi from Finland – for the Sámi High School of Jokkmokk, Sweden, to continue his training there for two years.
The handicraft exhibition of Ilmari Tapiola displays chests, dishes, bowls, boxes, knives, reeds, shuttles, horn spoons, belt buttons and hooks. Tapiola’s handicraft is characterized by distinct designs and strongly dyed stylized ornamentation that has been carved on the pieces of handicraft.
His themes include braids, plaits, basket-work ornamentation, stars and suns, but sometimes he decorates, freehand, his work with natural motifs and figures from the Sámi drums. He makes his handicraft both for the use of his own family and for sale.
The handicrafts of the exhibition are made of “hard” materials, that is, from birch gnarls and the high quality antlers of a bull reindeer. The gnarl lids of chests and containers and the handles of gnarl cups have been decorated with antler inlays. Some knife sheaths, reeds and shuttles are made from only one material: horn.
The carvings on the horn are made visible with the help of a colour that has been ground from charcoal. Air compressor tools have made it easier to work the materials, but it is now more difficult to actually get a hold of the materials that one needs.
The exhibition was conducted with the help of Finnagora and the Museum of Ethnography
On the Heroes Square you can find two beautiful museums; the Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Hall. A new and interesting modern exhibition has recently been opened in the Art Hall, and it has such a cool name as: “Over the Counter: the Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art.”
Over the Counter: the Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art
Art Hall
June 18 – September 19
Press release:
The exhibition called Over the Counter has been inspired by the economic illusions, utopias, creativity and frustration that Central Europe has been home to recently, and ismade relevant by the global economic crisis which began in 2008, and which can be looked upon as a negative critique of the process of adopting the capitalist order. The title of the exhibition refers to different work progresses going on in the service sector, and beyond this to the position of artists in the production. Eitherwe take the „effective” evasion of certain rules, or the crossings of different economical processes, we find the product on the counter, and this is the very thing to which we can relate. The English version of the title stands for a quasi informal or directmarket that avoids stockmarket. Also it canmean non-prescriptionmedicine – in the case of the exhibition we would like to state the flexibility of economical processes and the existence of an out-of-control but operable mechanism. The exhibit offers an opportunity to look for artistic practices that thematize such social conditions that result from the economic changes of the past few decades, or bear testimony to outlooks that root in artistic attitudes towards these changes.
In 1989 the socialist countries entered what came to be called the transition period. Politically, itmeant the adoption of democratic institutions, while economically it was a transition from socialism to market economy, the institutions of a neoliberal capitalist system. Currently, the post-socialist countries are experiencing a double crisis: one the one hand, the transitionalmodel envisaged twenty years ago seems to be unsuccessful, and on the other, the region has still not reached the level of western modernity. The idea of communism can be considered a radical version ofmodernism,whichmay have failed but still presents a cultural and social challenge when it comes to reinterpreting, reforming or replacing the institutional and behavioural ideals it proposed. Art, a branch of the entertainment industry, is put into a difficult position by the current crisis as the new investment interests havemade it something of a luxury article.
The exhibition features artist, fenomenons, problems fromall over the region, from the Czech Republic to Armenia, fromLithuania to the former Yugoslavia, artists who redraw the political map of Eastern Europe: these are not the eastern outposts of the European Union, but a territory where survival and prosperity do not follow the westernmodels, but was predestinated to go on a different way.
“A collection within the collection” is an interesting exhibition about prints, posters and drawings in the Hungarian National Gallery. More information can be found below if you read the press release.
A Collection Within the Collection
National Gallery
June 15, 2010 – February 13, 2011
Press release:
As for the number of items contained, the department of drawings and prints holds the largest collection in the Hungarian National Gallery. However, the significance of prints and drawings is less well known, as paper-based objects are very sensitive and cannot be included in the permanent exhibition. The array of cabinets with prints and drawings has, for five consecutive years now, represented an effort to change this, showing a constantly renewed selection to accompany the permanent exhibition of twentieth-century paintings and statues. Collections of posters in Budapest museums, including the Hungarian National Gallery, have recently started to come to the forefront. Being on the borderline between drawing and printing and held partly in the collection of drawings and partly in that of posters, poster and book designs continue to remain hidden treasures, a hidden ‘collection within the collection’, as it were. In 2010, two of our exhibitions will feature graphic design: illustrations will be on display at the show of Félicien Rops’ art to be opened in September, while an exhibition of modern Hungarian commercial posters dating from the inter-war period, currently housed in the National Széchényi Library, will be opened in October. The program of the year 2010 has provided the stimulus for us to compile the content of the graphic cabinets including graphic design (i.e. book and commercial design) works from the collection of drawings and prints in the Hungarian National Gallery.
