Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

LÓRÁND BERECZKY: The First Fifty Years - 50™ ANNIVERSARY OF THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Katalin SINKÓ: The Making of an Independent National Gallery: Between Memory and History

provide a greater say to museum experts in acquiring Hungarian paintings for museums. Who is the collector? The museum or the ministry disposing of funds, in the last analysis, the minister himself! The question arose not only in the teens, but again and again even in the late 1980s - especially with regard to living art. The modern Hungarian gallery had already been sequestered from the foreign material of the modern gallery in 1913, but the consequences were drawn by Petrovics. His aim was not only to establish a modern Hungarian gallery, but also to track monuments of old Hungarian art. The New Hungarian Picture Gallery created by Petrovics in 1928 meant a new station in the independent museum representation of Hungarian art. (111. 2) He thus set up a "separate shelter" for the Hungarian painting of the preceding decades, and also made extraordinary acquisitions for its purposes. He was the first one to clearly distinguish between collecting old and modern works, and the stumbling blocks the latter involved. With regard to where the gallery should be placed, he suggested reconstructing the Arts Hall on Heroes' Square - an idea that would crop up in the debates concerning the place of the Hungarian National Gallery in the 1950s again. Between 1932 and 1942, Bálint Hóman was the Minister of Religion and Cultural Affairs, who argued for museums as scholarly institutions, and was a follower of the scholarly policy line as opposed to the public educational one. He firmly believed that self-contained, pure scholarship was the foundation of all culture. The new conditions were stipulated in Act number VIII of 1934 on the National Museum. Actually, the law brought about a strong centralization of the museum sphere in contrast to Klebelsberg's earlier intentions of providing it autonomy; in other words, bureaucratic control gained the upper hand in museum affairs again. The new law integrated all museums of country-wide scope in the institutional structure called "National Museum". The national aspect of the collecting activities of museums and the endeavours to bring together all materials with a Hungarian bearing were particularly stressed. The measures fundamentally affected not only museum officials, but also the collections in museums with a country-wide scope, which were now turned into "departments" of the National Museum. The successor of Petrovics as the director the Museum of Fine Arts, Dénes Csánky. proved to be more conformable to the statist "leading principles" of Hóman. Csánky established the independent Old Hungarian Collection and its Department. Their coming into being was in a way a direct consequence of the cultural policies of Klebelsberg and Hóman. As far as collecting and exhibiting modern Hungarian art, Csánky lacked the foresight of Petrovics. To no avail was he warned by his critics that "time is a better selector than contemporaries, and thus the latest materials are usually ripened separately even abroad." The transport of the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts abroad during World War II was carried out under Csánky's auspices. The question whether this was "stowing away for safekeeping" or "robbery" continues to be interpreted differently. PERIODS IN MUSEUM AFFAIRS IN THE POST-1945 ERA The forms and motives of spreading education by the state significantly changed following the Enlightenment, 1900 and especially 1945. While education as a public task was stressed in 4. Municipal Picture Gallery, October 1948. Gábor 0. Pogány and Zsuzsa Fehér organizing the exhibition Hundred Hungarian Artists. Photo by Sándor Bojár, Hungarian National Museum, Photo Collection earlier periods, the concept of man educating - "cultivating" himself evolved later. In the post-war decades, museums were judged according to the roles they played in educating the public. The task of educating people was transformed into "re-educating" them. The social function of art also changed, art policy becoming an independent branch of cultural policy. Though certain artistic tendencies had been accorded official recognition from the Millennium (1896), no independent art policy within cultural policy could be spoken of either in the pre-World War I or the interwar period. This occurred only after 1949 in emulation of Soviet cultural political patterns, as the arts had a prominent role in the propaganda of the regime. In the administration of museum affairs after the Communist takeover in 1949 until the very end of the 1970s, motives of popular - or mass - education dominated. "Soviet style" museums were established with the sole function of teaching the people. After 1956, "popular education" gradually got out of use and was replaced by "public culture", "the organization of public culmre", and, by the end of the 1970s, "the organization of culture" or "the management of cultural values". The mass-education trend stood in marked contrast with the museum tradition of the earlier decades and Western type of museum management. It was from the end of the 1970s that a slow