Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 12. (Budapest, 1992)

Márta Péter

(MRS. I. KORMOS) MÁRTA PÉTER (1940-1991) It always seems to be in poor taste to write an obituary for a colleague who dies before retirement. To compose one for an elderly person is also far from easy, but to use this sad genre for younger persons seems out of place. Márta Péter was indeed in her active years; moreover, she was one of the most active members of the Hungarian museum community. However, it is not easy for an outsider to assess her work, since she lacked typical parameters and milestones of titles, awards, long lists of publications and exhibitions. She was Assistant Director of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts and received one of the most important decorations Hungarian museology can award and the only one granted for purely professional achievement. Yet tides and ranks in her case are especially inadequate to express the totality and continuity of her career. If we add, with uninvited detachment, that she had no, or just a few, measurable and registerable, achievements, our chance to understand her career as a whole almost vanishes. In the fifty-one years of her life, Márta Péter did not write monographs, handbooks or chapters for various encyclopaedias, and the number of exhibitions bearing by her name alone was also quite low. But those who are familiar with "Museum Man", an extremely fine and remarkably self-sacrificing type not rare in this area, well know that diere are quite a few among them widi brilliant intelligence, who are experts of an entire collection instead of a single field. Beyond being familiar with art history, tiiey also know in depth all die theory and practice of a complex which we call a "museum". They do not submit dissertations to acquire academic titles or prepare exhibitions and catalogues requiring several years' effort. Nor do they pursue deep research work in documentation and museum administration or choose any of die highlighted jobs of museum pedagogy and social representation. Instead they eschew all the above and utilize their knowledge for die benefit of otiiers, for die benefit of the museum as a whole. And they have all the competence to do so. Beside her exceptional talent, Márta Peter's comprehensive competence was due to her strict work ethos. She gained dominance step by step over the different territories of her profession, as if she had been preparing systematically for the work ever since adolescence. She was an assistant in die Budapest Museum of Applied Arts after finishing secondary school. After graduating from the Faculty of Arts at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, in art history and Italian, she started her career at die Bakony Museum in Veszprém. In the countryside she obtained the essential diversity of a Hungarian art historian working outside the capital, and trained herself for significant intellectual achievements