Kárpáti Zoltán - Liptay Éva - Varga Ágota szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 101. (Budapest, 2004)
ANNUAL REPORT 2004 - A 2004. ÉV - PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS - ÁLLANDÓ KIÁLLÍTÁSOK - ILDIKÓ EMBER, ESZTER FABRY, AND ANNAMÁRIA GOSZTOLA: New Permanent Exhibition of the Old Masters' Gallery
ANNUAL REPORT 2004 PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS NEW PERMANENT EXHIBITION OF THE OLD MASTERS' GALLERY Curators: Ilona Balogh, Ildikó Ember, Eszter Fabry, and Annamária Gosztola When in 1998, due to de-installing the Museum's so-called City Park wing in preparation for restoration work, we arranged a "temporary permanent exhibition" on the other side of the building, entitled The Old Masters ' Gallery - an alternative arrangement, and concluding the article informing as to our intentions, I referred, with some optimism, to our hope that following the reconstruction, we could present the collection in an "entirely different" fashion. 1 We could hardly imagine then, that we could truly begin to return to the original wing in 2003, and that in the spring of 2005 we could actually say that in the wing of the Gallery facing the City Park, the German and Austrian, Flemish and Dutch, as well as Spanish parts of the collection would be on view in the representative new permanent exhibition. The permanent collections of the numerous museums of the world have lived through transformations as of late, and this process naturally did not leave the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest untouched. The time had come for us to revise the concept of the presentation of the collection, expanding the material of the earlier exhibition associated with the name of Andor Pigler with recent acquisitions and pieces from storage. Thus we could aspire to present the internationally acknowledged collection of the Old Masters' Gallery in all its multiplicity, as fitting contemporary principles of exhibition concept. The enrichment of the exhibition with artworks that were previously on view only on rare occasions, if at all, at the same time, resulted in the current permanent exhibition reflecting more suitably the internal proportions within the collection of old European painting, comprising today nearly three thousand pictures. Seven years ago, we employed the concentrated arrangement born from necessity as a means of illustrating the interplay between the individual masters and various schools, as well as the correlations between painting tendencies, at the same time evoking the style of arrangement of the old galleries. Now, when we regained the restored area, the opportunity presented itself for us to follow the history of the given periods of European painting, illustrated with a significantly larger number of works, based on a linear arrangement, in which the individual artworks gain more emphasis. Several paintings were restored especially for this occasion, contributing a great deal to this portion of the exhibition, truly providing an impression of the force of innovation. 1 I. Ember, "A propos du réaménagement de l'exposition permanente de la Galerie des Maîtres Anciens," Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts 88-89 (1998), 235^0.
