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 - Anna SZINYEI MERSE: Periods, Masters, Styles, Themes...: 19th-Century Painting in the National Gallery

8. The late paintings of Károly Lötz now dominate the last section of the U-shaped series of rooms. Previously Szinyei Merse's pictures were on display here (see 111. 13). hint at the presence of this kind of subject matter, too. And so and so forth, always maintaining the possibilities of referring forward and back - but never distracting attention from the principle message of the given space. In the central room, we for instance hung a realistic portrait and a peasant genre piece by Soma Orlai Petrich and Mihály Szemlér respectively from around 1860 as the direct predecessors of the realist paintings by Munkácsy in the other wing. Similarly, by having a landscape by Antal Ligeti and Károly Telepy each in the last room, witnessing a more relaxed, fresher painterly vision, we were able to refer to the aspirations of the following generation that constitute the other major part of the exhibition.

10 As the visitor progresses section by section in the series of rooms, the major mid-century and later aspirations unfold, and greater opportunities open up to give more emphatic presentations of the works of seminal artists. In cases of oeuvres smaller in size or more unified in style, we managed to create sort of one-man units. If the painter's life spanned several periods, we attempted to connect the stylistic periods to focal points characterizing each of them - as we did in the case of Károly Lötz and Bertalan Székely. (Ills. 8-9) Alongside them, a number of talented Hungarian painters had worked at home and abroad, of whose works the National Gallery owns a sizeable collection, and the arrangement of Petrovics displayed many of them (e.g. Ottó Baditz, Fülöp László or Gyula Stetka). We were sorry to have had to leave most of them out in the lack of space in this series of rooms, but the work of better known artists could not have been excluded. However, our selection has been able show a wide panorama without overcrowding exhibition spaces. One of the reasons for being able to balance the various periods, styles, genres and subjects matter in the exhibition was that in the last hundred years museologists have been able to eliminate the most painful wants in the 19

th-century Hungarian collection." At the time of the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1906, there had been no serious collection of material from the so-called Hungarian Age of Reform (1825—48). Apart from exhibiting a disproportionately large number of paintings by the Markos (father and sons) and Károly Brocky, only a few pictures by Barabás and the lesser masters were displayed. A separate hall was provided for the work of Munkácsy and Paál together and a special cabinet for 43 (!) pictures by Géza Mészöly (many of them small-scale). Surprisingly, the group of painters emerging in the 9. Paintings of different sizes, genres and styles by Benczúr, Székely, Lötz, Liezen-Mayer and Dósa in the building of the High Court, around 1960 decades before the opening had a numerous and wide-ranging presence - including even the Nagybánya, Szolnok and Gödöllő masters. Of the formerly neglected modern masters, Pál Szinyei Merse, Károly Ferenczy and Adolf Fényes were given an emphatic place by the hanging.

12 As the collection increased, there was an ever growing need for re-arrangement. According to recollections, Gábor Térey's 1912 arrangement was the most crowded one. He had separate rooms for the Marko family, for Lötz, for Zichy, one for Munkácsy and Paál together, as well as one for historical painting.

13 The most up-to-date and aesthetic selection and display was curated by Elek Petrovics in 1920 - the post-war arrangements were later to draw much on it. He had separate halls for paintings by Székely, Munkácsy, Paál and Szinyei Merse. His extraordinarily successful principles and methods of acquisition facilitated creating an overall picture that was more variegated and comprehensive than any before.

14 To return to our current exhibition, the visitor, when stepping out of the U-shaped sequence of rooms, finds himself among the historical paintings again, and this occasions him or her to sum up the material seen, to formulate a complex picture of the academic masters working in several genres. Continuing his visit in Building B, he can acquaint himself with the multi-faceted output of the new tendencies unfolding in the last third of the 19

th century. This part of the building contains spaces with an even more diverse character than those mentioned earlier, and we had to try to make a virtue of the givens. As we were still unable to do away with the air-conditioned glass-case system, the paintings by Munkácsy had to be hung in this series of rooms; thus it was "only" through selection that we could provide a more modern picture of the great master, who had started out from realism, reached plein-air and even historicism. I tried to put up as many landscapes, head studies and sketches as possible instead of the genre pictures that had dominated previous arrangements, and kept only the best of these. And then, when it turned out after new chemical tests and restorations that the asphalt ground of the majority of Munkácsy

's paintings did not inflict deterioration to the extent it had previously been thought to, and room air-conditioning was enough, the works could be freed from their air-conditioned glass cases. Moreover, they could be directly lit, and thus we could discover long-hidden beauties. The new arrangement with its more modern overall picture has won the master many