Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 14. (Budapest, 1994)
FERENCZY Mária: Hetvenöt éves a budapesti Hopp Ferenc Kelet-Ázsiai Művészeti Múzeum
one-man institution (Zoltán Takács had at most a single assistant from time to time) accepted a couple of specialists, among them the representatives of a new generation of museum workers with the command of Oriental languages. It was a great boon for the museum that in those years Ervin Baktay (1890-1963) worked for it as titular director: 22 he was a well-known researcher into Indian culture. The successors of Zoltán Takács as directors of the museum were also specialists in branches of Oriental art: Dr. Tibor Horváth (1910—1972) was a specialist on Japanese art, Károly Gombos (1924-1987) was an expert on Caucasian art, Dr. Pál Miklós ( 1927-) is a sinologist. The ties between the museum and the university have been also rejuvenated: lectures have been given on Oriental art as part of the training for art historians. 23 After 1948, the links between the museum and foreign countries were restricted to the socialist countries. On account of the lively interstate connections between Hungary and the Chinese People's Republic, the Korean People's Democracy and Vietnam respectively, a number of donations were made to the museum. The collections have been enriched by means of some substantial purchases and legacies: among others, the legacies of Dr. Dezső Bozóky (1871-?), ship's doctor, of Béla Ágai (1870-1944), journalist and art collector, of Dr. Ottó Fettick (1876-1944), college professor of veterinary science, of Dr. Vince Wartha (1844-1914) university professor of chemistry, of Ernő Zboray (1901-1959) engineer, deserve mention. 24 Precious objets d'art were donated by Professor Géza Fehérvári and Ödön Linger also. 25 Owing to this growth, the museum soon outgrew the founder's villa: the store-rooms have been moved to the building of the Museum of Applied Arts, the mother institution for some forty years (later even the office was moved there). Since 1949 the Ferenc Hopp Museum has held regular exhibitions. In contrast with the past, its material has been exhibited in a variety of forms in thematical exhibitions owing to lack of space from one collection at a time and/or groups of objects illustrating a single topic. From 1955 on, the area for exhibitions became larger: now the exhibitions of the Ferenc Hopp Museum are also housed in the György Ráth Museum of the Museum of Applied Arts (which was named for some thirty years the „Chinese Museum"). Since 1955 a joint yearbook of the Museum of Applied Arts and the Ferenc Hopp Museum has been published - with breaks from time to time -, offering a forum for scholarly work. 26 The fiftieth anniversary of the museum was celebrated in 1969 by the museum with an international conference, a jubilee exhibition and the publication of a guide-book introducing the collections. 27 Presently more than twenty thousand objets d'art are kept in the museum. The sphere of its collecting activity is larger than that suggested by the name: its Chinese and Japanese collections are the largest, the representative, ones, but in addition to them the Indian collection is not insignificant either. In the opinion of Ferenc Hopp and Zoltán Takács, the concept of Far East /Eastern Asia embraces - also according to the wording of the testament cited above - the whole of India, as well as, in the wording of Zoltán Takács „every region in which in traditional culture and arts Buddhism played a significant role". 28 Although all these are not understood in the geographic sense, the manifold connections between Buddhist and non-Buddhist art - as well as the actual state and character of our collections - speak for the delineation of this larger scope. Besides these collections there are objets d'art from Korea, Vietnam, and Indonesia, as well as those from the Near East, representing the culture of Islam. 29 The library of the museum collects books and periodicals dealing with Oriental art and Oriental culture, in several Eastern and Western languages. Out of the Oriental collections of three continents it has exchange links
