Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2008)

ANNUAL REPORT • A 2008. ÉV - PÉTER BAKI: Soul and Body: Kertész to Maplethorpe through the Eyes of the Greatest Masters of Photography

SOUL AND BODY: KERTÉSZ TO MAPLETHORPE THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GREATEST MASTERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY 1 June - 2 1 September 2008 Curator: Péter Baki PETER BARI, SOUL AND BODY: KERTÉSZ TO MAPPLETI lORPE THROUGH THE EYES OF THE GREATEST MASTERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY 2008. HUNGARIAN AND ENGLISH TEXT. 491 PP., 227 B&W AND COL. ILLS., ISBN 978 963 7063 52 7 Some paths cross often and some hardly at all. If one path is intertwined with another, if it embraces the other, both can equally enjoy a productive and inspiring union. The 103-yearold Museum of Fine Arts has become number one on the list of most visited museums in Central Europe and among the top fifty most visited museums in the world. Photography, looking back on 170 years of history, enjoyed an unprecedented number of visitors in the last decade both in Hungary and abroad, and reached very high prices at auctions. The paths of these two had not met before this exhibition. In the summer of 2008 the Museum of Fine Arts held a unique exhibition which for the first time displayed photographic works of art. This pioneering path was undertaken for the Museum of Fine Arts by dr. László Baán. The trust he put in photography was not misplaced: the photo exhibition entitled Body and Soul attracted over seventy thousand visitors in just four months. Important photographic exhibitions staged in Hungary had thus far either presented the works of a clearly delineable period, a photographer's individaual artistic career or the photographs of a group of artists. Body and Soul broke away from this tradition: visitors not only had the opportunity to sample the works of the outstanding artists of photography but through their thematic arrangement

—based on the fundamental duality of human existence

—they also had