Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

LÓRÁND BERECZKY: The First Fifty Years - 50™ ANNIVERSARY OF THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Katalin SINKÓ: The Making of an Independent National Gallery: Between Memory and History

The fact that the demands of popular education and public culture were patronized by the state probably contributed to the increased attention folk crafts and naïve art received. The Hungarian fashion for naïve art had its precedents in the discovery of peasant "natural geniuses" in the interwar period. The second wave of discovering naïve art in Hungary in the 1960s was also not a unique feature of Hungarian art life, having its parallels throughout Europe. However, it was on the basis of the ideological aspect of public education that the Department of Naïve Art at the National Gallery was set up, which gathered some 1000 art objects between 1970 and 1975. This was to be the core material of a special museum established in Kecskemét in 1976. Genuinely substantial change in the work of the museum could be observed in the exhibition arranged together with the Österreichische Galerie - The Szolnok School of Painters / Die Szolnoker Malerschule - in the autumn of 1975. It was on show not only at the new Budapest National Gallery, but in Szolnok, Vienna and Graz, too. On the Austrian side, it was organized by the team of the director of the Österreichische Galerie, Hans Aurenhammer. This was the probably the first sign of Hungarian art history demonstrating an ability to transcend the "little Hungarian" or "nationalist-withdrawing" view of history, which had already been surpassed in the historiography of the seventies. However, it took another decade for Hungarian museology to give up its former "withdrawal into the national tradition" and deem its task to be the connection of its art history to European and, in particular, Central European developments in art. THE NATIONAL GALLERY BETWEEN 1980 AND 2000: OPENING TO WORLD CULTURE By the beginning of the 1980s, the drive to develop a socialist style public culture completely lost its force. The party policies that determined the activities of museums in the preceding decades, namely: the stress on workers' education, the programmes for the cultural development of under-educated groups, the party control of art life, etc., could no longer be implemented as the country ran into debts and the socialist economy went bankrupt. Budgetary constraints on national cultural establishments were applied to the National Gallery, as well. Director general Lóránd Bereczky, appointed in 1982, began to take steps toward institutional autonomy and renewal from 1983, and to seek funding from places formerly never thought of. Upon his initiative, the National Gallery began to function as an organization with an independent budget, which meant that it could establish subsidiary companies, seek and involve sponsors. Based on new financial opportunities, the National Gallery could turn from being an institution of mass education into a new style cultural centre. By the end of the 1980s, the new corporate image of the National Gallery was developed. This implied its operation as an independent scholarly research institution and the autonomous and creative fulfilment of its educational tasks. In spite of the difficulties involved in the transformation, successes were reflected in the continually increasing number of visitors. Instead of extensive growth, the stress now fell on the scholarly treatment of the material already held by the gallery. In the beginning of the 1980s, the National Gallery managed to introduce the institution of major periodical exhibitions based on solid scholarship - a type of show certainly regarded as a novelty in Hungary at the time. All the professional and scholarly preconditions of such major museum exhibitions fashionable abroad for several decades had been available in Hungary. The reasons for their institutionalization as late as the 1980s are to be sought in the lack of finances and in the fact that, during the long decades of socialism, museums had been regarded as means of educating the people, and requirement standards were set to the average. In putting up these major exhibitions, the National Gallery cooperated with foreign and home partner institutions in an increasingly wide range of areas. First and foremost, with the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1979, the two institutions joined their forces to arrange scholarship-based exhibitions for a deeper understanding of various art periods (two exhibitions in 1

980-81 : Art in Hungary Between 1780 and 1830 and Art in Hungary Between 1830 and 1870). These types of exhibition continued to be arranged in the framework of other projects in the 1980s. The gallery treated formerly not broached movements and avant-garde aspirations (Hidden Dimensions: New Aspirations in Hungarian Art in the 1960s, 1991). The aim of working together with foreign art museums, especially in German-speaking areas, traditionally regarded as the natural partners of Hungarian cultural life, was to present the European contexts of the various art movements. In particular, it was the cultural institutions of Vienna, Dresden and Berlin that the Hungarian National Gallery developed thorough working relations with. Scholarly research made it obviously clear that the major trends, such as Art Nouveau, expressionism and the avantgardes had made their impact even here, "beyond the Leitha". The National Gallery devoted several exhibitions to the history of Hungarian museology. Parallel to the new directions major foreign partner institutions were taking, an increasing number of researches were conducted on the establishment of Hungarian art institutions and the changes in approaches to the past. (History Image: Extracts From the Relationship Between the Past and the Arts in Hungary, 2000). At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the National Gallery championed the settlement in Hungary of the Cologne-based Ludwig Museum. At first it provided room for exhibiting a selection from the material of the Ludwig Museum, then the two museums put up a joint display of their modern material. Already in the 1980s, the owners of the Ludwig Museum had been professing the cultural unity of Europe and mutual appreciation of artistic values. Partly due to the assistance of the National Gallery, the Ludwig Museum, the only museum in Hungary collecting latest trends in both foreign and Hungarian art, was able to find its place in the network of museums in the country. The establishment of a capitalist economy from the 1990s and the requirements of mass culture ascending throughout the world, as well as shrinking state support for public institutions have contributed to the increasing role of mass entertainment. Museums have had to adapt to these requirements, the danger of which is, however, that their original functions - the long-term upholding and sustenance of national memory - will again be pushed into the background. The National Gallery has attempted to meet both types of requirement. Apart from its public educational programmes, it continues to conduct basic researches, the scholarly treatment of its collections.