Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 29. (Budapest, 2013)
Imre TAKÁCS: The Upgrade Programme for the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts
10. Glass cabinets with Hab an ceramics, Museum of Applied Arts, 2014 set of associations. They will find themselves travelling along cultural routes, and will clearly perceive the crossroads and intersections. The exercise of these choices of how they view the exhibits will give visitors a different dimension of experience: the sense of artistic freedom. An illustrative example is the three-way fork in the passageways of the south wing, where the great sources of late-19'h-century inspiration meet with their consequences: European historicism, Far Eastern art and fin- de-si'ecle art nouveau. The size and the composition of the museum’s collections would be suited to permanent exhibitions embracing the entire sweep of art history and culture from the early Middle Ages to the late 20lh century, and from America to Japan, in sections structured around historical and civilisa- tional contexts. If we took this route, however, we could put no more than 5% of the 200,000 items (including graphics and historic photographs) on display. To fulfil the requirement that the museum should give a full insight into the design and making of objects, we must come up with a way of rendering the remainder of the material accessible. We thus turned to the logical solution, following the example of the Victoria and Albert Museum, of supplementing high visual-impact era-based exhibitions with dense displays of art objects in “visible storage”. This means providing satisfactory conditions for displaying all of the art objects in the museum’s collections, except those whose conservation requirements preclude their permanent exhibition. Each collection is grouped by material. Arranged in logical order, the greater part of the collection will be visible here, packed closely in shelved cabinets (ceramics, metalwork, and clocks) or placed in automatically controlled drawers and browsable holders (lace, fans, embroidery, graphics). Designed to hold nearly 50,000 pieces in dense arrays, the visible storage units do not lend themselves to the use of individual labels, and to be really useful will require the application of computer database techniques. The overwhelming mass of objects in the visible storage units, fitted out with IT devices, will itself be a visual experience, but their real usefulness will be measured in the public talks held there, the educational programmes designed around them, and spontaneous services provided to university students, collectors, art dealers and the whole interested public (Fig. 10-11). 11. Cabinets with drawers of embroidery from the Middle Ages, Museum of Applied Arts, 2014 16
