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

The proposal of the Revolutionary Committee, as it were, blended the functions of the former Hóman National Museum Council and the recent MMOK. The Council of Museums would have been an autonomous body, its leaders being appointed from among its members by secret ballot. The fundamental principle of the reorganization was regarded as "greatest possible independence for museums, the social form of substantive control and the administrative and supervisory function of state administration." There was a gleam of hope that museums could again be fora of scholarly research. Among the consequences of the revolution, the Museum of the Working-Class Movement became subject to state administration. Upon the request of the ministry, Andor Pigler inspected its seat, the building of the former High Court, which had been refurbished for exhibition purposes previously, and proposed that it should house the National Gallery to be set up from the material in the Modern Hungarian Department of the Museum of Fine Arts. In April 1957, the deputy minister appointed Gábor Ö. Pogány, the deputy director of the Museum of Fine Arts, to organize the new museum. According to the records, the examples followed in setting up the Hungarian National Gallery included the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Russian Museum of Leningrad and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. However, the decisive impetus for the establishment was the Viennese gallery already referred to. Another important model was the National Gallery in Prague. In 1959, a government decree provided for housing the National Gallery in the Buda Castle to be rebuilt. Its scope of acquisitions, however, was only modified when the collection was finally moved up into the castle. The Museums Act of 1963 determined the future fate of the National Gallery, its transfer to the Buda Castle, and extended its scope of acquisition from the foundation of the Hungarian Kingdom to the present. The Museum of Fine Arts became a museum of foreign works of art old and new. In the beginning of the 1970s, several economic reform measures were put in place in the areas of public culture, somewhat allowing for cultural processes initiated from below. Club movements were strengthened; within limits, market mechanisms could operate. In the area of acquisitions, 8. Detail of the exhibition 20"' Anniversary of the Hungarian National Gallery, October 1977. Photo: HNG Archive, inv. no.: 20736/1980/5 the National Gallery could make good use of a modest upswing in the art market in the first half of the 1960s. Collecting contemporary art, however, was quite a different kettle of fish. Museums were little involved in public purchases from living artists, decisions being made by juries and committees working in the frameworks of the Association of Fine and Applied Artists or the Art Fund of the Hungarian People's Republic. Between 1965 and 1981, the so-called "two-million acquisition limit" brought about some change, in the spending of which museum requests were also taken into account. Transforming the Danube wing of the Buda Castle into the National Gallery also implied that the most important monuments of mediaeval Hungarian art, panel paintings, wood carvings, fragments of sculptural decorations would be presented to the public there. The concept formulated in the 1960s, that the Hungarian National Gallery should collect, on the one hand, historical mementos of art in Hungary from the foundation of the Hungarian state and, on the other, contemporary works of art, was actually implemented as a result of the move up to the castle, with all the professional, collecting and political repercussions that were to arise from the duality of historical requirements and currently changing circumstances. (Colour Plate XV) From the 1970s, the inefficiency of cultural institutions began to be discussed even publicly, and the crisis of the former popular educational system became ever more apparent. Instead of "popular education", "public culture" came to the fore, implying a new relationship between individual and community. The requirements of public culture defined the activities of museums, too. However, the preponderance of quantity-mindedness burgeoned bureaucracy; the lack of trust due to over-politicization fostered only activities that would square with and be measurable to centrally prescribed directives. The five-year plans broken down for museums sought to deepen this extensive approach to public culture. All this took place in the decade the Hungarian state ran into massive debts. The crisis of the system came to a head in the beginning of the 1980s, when radical change could no longer be put off. The new National Gallery in the Buda Castle was opened to the public on October 12, 1975. To stabilize the relationship between the museum and contemporary art, a series of exhibitions called Workshop was started. The series lived on until 1982, and belonged to the programmes that put on show the works of not only acknowledged or celebrated artists, but also young ones, displaying novel experiments, as well as several masters who were deemed to belong to "the second publicity". Between 1976 and 1981, over 80 Workshop shows were arranged. Apart from the new collection departments - the Old Hungarian Collection and the Contemporary Collection -, the Department of Public Culture was set up in 1974 according to earlier plans. Besides organizing exhibitions, its task was to manage public relations, create new types of children and adult educational projects and organizations. Public educational and sociological experience and knowledge found their way into museums. This was the time when the germs of future civic initiatives came into being. One these was the Museum Friends Circle which has worked successfully ever since its foundation at the time. Another still thriving institution set up in the 1970s is the uniquely creative GYIK-Mühely (Child and Youth Fine Arts Workshop).