Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)
ANNUAL REPORT 2005 - A 2005. ÉV - MÓNIKA KUMIN: From Romanticism to Post-Imressionism: New Permanent Exhibition of the Department of Art after 1800
The following cabinet (no. 18) has put on display the pastoral works of Charles Jacque, Constant Troyon and Jules Bastien-Lepage, and —exploiting the vista to Courbet's Wrestlers in the great hall —it provides a summary on Courbet's Realism and on the Barbizon School. The three successive cabinets 2 follow development in a pictorial analysis of landscape painting up to Impressionism: they start off with the traditional plein air expressions of Eugène Boudin's View of Portrieux and Charles-François Millet's canvas depicting Puy-de-Dome, while Claude Monet's Port of Trouville and Eduard Manet's emblematic Woman with a Fan already attest to the change in artistic concepts, representing the experiment of resolution of the composition. The mature works of Monet, Three Fishing Boats and Plum Trees in Blossom, as well as Renoir's Portrait of a Girl and Paul Gauguin's Snow-Covered Garden are characteristic Impressionist works. Camille Pissarro's Pont-Neuf marks a step further in the direction of divisionism, the optical resolution of colours. Post-Impressionism had its start in the 1890s; represented here by the work of Gauguin, Black Swine, painted in his mature, Oceania period, and the satirical painting of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, These Ladies. Next to Auguste Rodin's Eternal Spring, the clearly articulated, classical forms of the small sculptures of Aristide Maillol bear testimony to the parting trends of French sculpture circa 1900. The severe visual structures and the heavy, modular forms of Cezanne's Buffet are the forerunners of the new logic of visual composition that was to triumph with Cubism. The paintings are proportionally complemented to form a harmonious unity by the selection of the most beautiful portraits from the rich sculpture collection: works by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Albert-Ernest CarrierBelleuse, Rodin and Jules Lagae. The row of cabinets concludes with the last thematic group of sculptures and paintings: Rodin's Suzon, the bust of Diana by Alexandre Falguiére, Gustav Doré's Young Woman with a White Kerchief and Alfred Stevens' Woman with a Harp show different aspects of depicting women over the nineteenth century, and at the same time interplay with the neighbouring hall of the Old Masters' Gallery, where eighteenth century British portraits are staged. As a result of the reconstruction works carried out in this wing, the exhibition halls received a new "image": the dark red flagstones, the wooden panels on the lower walls and the doorposts make a sort of frame to the neutral, natural colour of the wall. Within this "framework" the works are placed slightly above eye-level, leaving 80-90 cm distance between them. The pictures are placed with economy and restraint, which
