Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)

ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - JUDIT GESKÓ: Van Gogh in Budapest

and prints were displayed together since there is no qualitative difference between them, and because displaying them together led to a complex and more authentic presentation of the painter's artistic personality. Furthermore, it is characteristic of Van Gogh's style to combine the different techniques of drawing and painting. The Paris phase was represented by fewer works and illustrated both how Van Gogh had learned the technique of impressionist landscape painting and how his personal style emerged within the framework of this. Works were displayed from the periods of Aries, Saint-Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise, which were probably the most familiar to museum visitors. These highly characteristic paintings, though in smaller numbers than in the first two sections, conveyed every aspect of Van Gogh's themes. The majority of these works were selected from Van Gogh's less well-known paintings, which however, were by no means inferior works. A section was dedicated to the drawings and some paintings from among those Van Gogh regarded as his examples to follow. In addition, we displayed some art school volumes with the works Van Gogh copied in order to follow the process of his self-tuition. Most of the prints selected from the Budapest collection were also part of Van Gogh's private collection. The Dutch artistic traditions were recalled by the etchings of Rembrandt and the paintings of Adriaen van Ostade and Frans Hals. Van Gogh's Dutch contemporaries who influenced his initial career were represented by one painting and several drawings, which were the work of Jozef Israels, and by a painting from the hand of Johann Alberts Neuhuys. Both paintings were restored by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Hungary for the exhibition. Besides the drawings and prints of Charles-François Daubigny and Théodore Rousseau, works by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-François Millet were to illustrate those French artistic trends that were important for Van Gogh. In this section of the exhibition the visitor has the opportunity to learn which masters' artistic repertoire stimulated Van Gogh's interest and whose practical and theoretical works contributed to his development within a period of ten years that took him from being the son of a protestant clergyman to becoming one of the most influential figures of nineteenthcentury French art. Van Gogh started his career as an art dealer and as such he was well versed with art history together with the theoretical problems of painting. He continuously compared his works to those of his contemporaries and predecessors, and consciously measured his own emerging individual artistic world to the development of painting. The most inspirational among the great masters of the past was Rembrandt. The major artistic turning point in the nineteenth century involved the rejection of classicism and academic painting, and was accompanied by a change in value judgment regarding the old masters. Thus in artistic models Rembrandt re-