Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)
ANNUAL REPORT - A 2007. ÉV - BERT W. MEIJER: Congratulations Extended to Teréz Gerszi on her Eightieth Birthday
CONGRATULATIONS EXTENDED TO TERÉZ GERSZI ON HER EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY Delivered on 4 September, 2007 Within the —in my opinion —in some respects too closed world of art history, the specialists of old master drawings form a small group, a small special caste with its own special language, rules and habits, sometimes incomprehensible for outsiders, and also often opaque even for specialists in other art historical fields. For the rest of the world it is not always very clear what drawing scholars are talking about or getting excited about. Researching old master drawings requires a particular passion and feeling, and an intuitive identification with the creative process and peculiarities of an artist, in addition to professional training and experience. In the more than fifty years of her daily bureaucratic and other work in the printroom, of organizing exhibitions and preparing her many publications Teréz Gerszi has demonstrably shown that she possesses the very special and precious professional gifts and abilities necessary for this kind of work. I want to recall here just very briefly one of the indicators or tokens of her talents as I have experienced them recently. In 1982 Teréz dedicated her monograph on the drawings of Paulus van Vianen to the memory of three Dutch scholars, Jan van Gelder, Horst Gerson, and I. Q. van Regieren Altena. As many of you will know, of the three the latter was for several years head of the Printroom of the Rijksmuseum before being given a chair as professor of art history at Amsterdam University. Van Regieren Altena already looked old but also wise at the age of forty. He had a very special, personal sensitivity towards the medium of drawing, as well as a unique sensitivity towards the peculiarities of the individual draftsman, individual drawing and the history of its creation. A glimpse of these qualities has been preserved for posterity in the second edition of 1983 of his admirable book on Jacques de Gheyn's Drawings, the result of a lifelong experience. To my knowledge, Teréz has visited Van Regieren Altena quite a number of times in his sunny apartment on the third and fourth floor of a late nineteenth-century building overlooking the treetops of the Vondelpark. As the only real student of drawings and the only drawing connoisseur of these three Dutch outstanding scholars to whom Teréz dedicated her \ 7 ianen book, Van Regieren Altena must have been if not the most helpful then the most influential for her own professional orientation. Reading in her catalogue of the seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish drawings of the Museum of Eine Arts published two years ago here in Budapest, I was amazed and moved to realize at a certain point that if Professor Van Regteren Altena had
