Benkő Andrea: A Guide to Petőfi Literary Museum (Budapest, 2009)
The Art and Relics Collection
THE ART AND RELICS COLLECTION The rich art object collection in the Art Collection of the Petőfi Literary Museum includes paintings, drawings, small graphics, sculptures, coins and photographs. We inherited the spine of our 19th-century collection from the Petőfi House: pictures of Petőfi and some of his famous contemporaries, and Mór Jókai's vast bequest, primarily the graphics collection prepared for the author's anniversary. Through the Jókai-related works of fine art, our Museum came into possession of works by artists such as the Russian Verescsagin, as well as Miklós Barabás, Mihály Munkácsy, Mihály Zichy and Gyula Benczúr. The pieces most frequently on loan to exhibitions include Mihály Zichy's allegoric depiction, A magyar nép [The Hungarian People], or Artúr Ferraris's Történelmi tarokkparti [Historical Tarot Party] and Viktor Madarász's large-scale painting, Hazám [My Country] (1875). In 1951, the collection was enriched with paintings depicting Attila József, and paintings, graphics, photographs and relics that had been in the poet's possession. Since 1954, the collection interest of the Museum has officially embraced Hungarian literature in its entirety. The wealth of the Ady legacy purchased from the Ady family in 1965 also shows that this unusual, specialised literary and art collection can hold its own against other art collections. Today, the works of art by Lajos Tihanyi, Dezső Lajos Tihanyi: Interior in Nagyvárad, 1908 From Endre Ady's flat in Veres Pálné Street, Budapest Czigány, Károly Kernstok and József Rippl-Rónai are considered priceless, and not simply because of who their former owners were. The Art Collection also boasts several pastels from the portrait series which The Painting Repository of the Art and Relics Collection Rippl-Rónai began in 1923, in which he painted Hungarian writers. In addition to portraits, we collect works of art inspired by writers and poets, and illustrations made for literary works. We document representations and photographs relating to scenes from the writers' lives and endeavour to collect the paintings and drawings that decorated the walls in their homes. The writers' paintings, drawings and sketches in the Art Collection confirm the penetrability of the borderlands of the fine arts and the art of words. Some of our authors owned renowned art collections; for example, Milán Füst, Lajos Kassák and Tibor Déry. In the middle of the 1980s, the Art Collection also began to act as purchaser, conducting fine arts competitions on important anniversaries of the births of writers and poets. The result is a series of works testifying to the decades-long friendships between artists and writers. In every case the competitions were followed 17
