Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 105. (Budapest, 2006)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2006. ÉV - GÁBOR ÉBLI: An Erudite Cosmopolitan
Térey Gábor Egy konzervatív újító a Szépművészeti Múzeumban the words with which Gavro Manojlovoc, director of the Strossmayer Gallery, Zagreb, remembered his close colleague in his necrology. It is also worth citing this passage from Orsolya Radványi's book on Térey because it demonstrates several virtues of not only the onetime chief curator of the Old Masters' Gallery, but also of the volume. The book —after some thoroughly detailed, analytical chapters —offers an appendix of nearly three hundred documents and letters including several, hitherto unknown pieces such as the Zagreb letter. In the historical chapters Radványi plastically presents Térey's wdde, international network of contacts. In addition he devotes space to other, until now forgotten business and friendly relationships such as the one Térey fostered with Joseph Duveen, an American art dealer, towards the end of his life. By that time the art historian had already retired from the museum so it was as a kind of professional resurgence that he participated in Duveen's finally aborted project in the United States to sell an outstanding painting by Vermeer, which originated from the collection of Count Czernin in Bohemia. The book devotes proportionate attention to all the phases of Térey's career. It faithfully presents his family background and follows his successful activities after he earned his doctoral degree in Germany as well as his aspirations to be appointed general director of the Museum of Fine Arts —a peak in his field he desired but never reached. The author evaluates the various ups and downs in Térey's career with the realistic detachment of a historian. She discusses all the opportunities and commissions Térey was given, and how he dealt with them, keeping faithfully to a reconstruction of the events and their objective interpretation and avoiding personal interpretations with the benefit of hindsight, unfortunately so frequent in Hungarian historiography. She suggests with a fine yet express irony that the disciplinary procedures embittering the end of Térey's career were possibly unfounded, and furthermore that one and a half decades earlier, in the polemics surrounding the finally aborted purchase of the Marcell Nemes Collection, it was Térey who w r as in the right, both from a professional and an ethical point of view, and that his reputation was thus wrongly smeared.
