Gosztonyi Ferenc - Király Erzsébet - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2002-2004. 24/9 (MNG Budapest, 2005)

INDIVIDUAL RESEARCH. PHD THESES AT THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Anna Jávor: The Oeuvre of Johann Lucas Kracker (1719-1779)

THE OEUVRE OF JOHANN LUCAS KRACKER (1719-1779) BY ANNA JÁVOR Born in Austria, active in a number of countries and dying in Eger, Hungary, painter Johann Lucas Kracker had a career typical of the 18th-century artist. After studies in Vienna, the first commission in Ljubljana and marriage in Znojmo, it was in the 1750s that he started working regularly in Hungary, especially for the Premonstratensians of Jászó (now Jasov, Slovakia). Following more than a decade of'commuting', including an important commission in Prague and others in Lower Austria, he settled permanently in Eger in 1768. The dissertation aims to provide a monographic discussion of Kracker's life work. It has two major parts, a study and a catalogue of the oeuvre, and contains in addition some of the more important source texts, illustrations, a unified bibliography of sources and secondary literature, as well as a concordance of place names. Both parts follow Kracker's career in a chronological order. Data on the works' locations, dates, commissioners and subjects helped me reconstruct the spirit or even the programme behind groups of works (Prague, Jászó, Nová Rise, the Eger Lyceum) and allows us to form a notion of contemporary reception and critical judgement - even though some of the works have been destroyed. During this synthesis it appeared that the oeuvre can be divided more along creative periods than geographical lines: the first frescos in Jászó and the group of works in Varannó (Vranov n. T.) are as much the early works of 'the painter of the city of Znojmo' from the 1750s as the altar-pieces in Brno and Znojmo or the wall paintings in the refectories in Nová Rise and Moravská Tfebová. The volume and obvious rank of the assignments, and the quality of the finished works demand that we consider a mere four years a distinct period, with the 'magnum opuses' of Prague and Jászó (1760-1764), while the first phase of his work