Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - ÉVA NYERGES: The New Permanent Exhibition of the Spanish Collection in the Old Masters' Gallery

THE ANNUAL REPORT 2005 THE NEW PERMANENT EXHIBITION OF THE SPANISH COLLECTION IN THE OLD MASTERS' GALLERY Curator: Eva Nyerges The new permanent exhibition of the Spanish Collection within the Old Masters' Gallery was opened on 4 April 2005, in six halls and one cabinet on the first floor of the Museum. The previous permanent exhibition, staged by Andor Pigler, which was on view

r for decades, displayed some fifty artworks in four halls, meaning about the half of the Spanish Collection at the time. In the last twenty years, the collection was substantially enriched, as a result of the consciously planned acquisitions and a number of artwork exchanges between museums. The Spanish material, however, was also "expanded" from internal sources, i.e., from the collection of the Old Masters' Gallery, through the new identification of works previously grouped to other schools, and by the Spanish attribution of works with hitherto unknown authorship. Today the Spanish gallery counts some one-hundredand-ten pieces, and within the new exhibition, two-thirds of them, more than eighty paintings, can be viewed.

1 The new Spanish exhibition was on display only until December 2005, for in the same halls, preparation work began for the international showing, El Greco, Velázquez, Goya - Five Centuries of Spanish Masterpieces, which was open to the public between 27 January and 14 May 2006. After the closure of this temporary exhibition, the permanent Spanish exhibition was reopened on 24 June 2006, with some slight modifications. In the following, I shall recapitulate the novelties of the permanent exhibition. In both versions of the new exhibition of the Spanish Collection, the paintings were staged in the chronological order familiar from the Old Masters' Gallery. The recent