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 - Anna SZINYEI MERSE: Periods, Masters, Styles, Themes...: 19th-Century Painting in the National Gallery

ANNA SZINYEI MERSE Periods, Masters, Styles, Themes.

..: 19th-Century Painting in the National Gallery Slowly recovering, reviving from the catastrophic consequences of the Second World War, it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that European culture states reached a stage where they could one by one set up permanent exhibitions of their national art as indispensable means of self-representation in reconstructed or newly designed museum buildings. Displays on the 19

th century, which had had a fundamental role in the unfolding and flowering of national art, attracted particular attention. In the case of larger groups of buildings, such collections were usually housed in separate wings, or, when the selected material and the size and character of the building chosen enabled it, 19

lh-century art was exhibited in separate venues, such as the Blessed Agnes Convent (opened in 1980) in the case of the Prague National Gallery

1 or the famous Sukiennice (Drapers' Hall) - upholding an old tradition but modernizing the exhibition - in the case of the Krakow National Museum.

2 Playing a key role in Central European art, Munich, from as early as 1853, had the particular advantage of the Neue Pinakothek, the dream of an art-loving Bavarian king, the first European museum built exclusively for contemporary art.

3 It was destroyed in bombings in 1945, but rebuilt and furnished to meet state-of-the-art museological requirements in 1981. Eberhard Ruhmcr, the head of the team formulating the concept of the permanent exhibition covering the period between 1780 and 1910, sought to emphasize the diversity of the 19

,h century, his aim being among others to be able to present not only the formal features of the various tendencies, but also their depths of content. Investigating iconographie, iconological and even sociological, political and other connections in paintings, the new generation of researchers would no longer be satisfied by selections focussing almost exclusively on impressionism according to the principles laid down primarily by Hugo von Tschudi.

4 In the extraordinarily complex and often contradictory 19

th century, certain aspirations cropped up quite early, then went dormant for some while and came to fruition much later. Some masters made surprising innovations early in their careers, but later compromised themselves or became uninteresting, while others took the opposite way. Unexpected breakthroughs and standstills and most of all simultaneous diversity were characteristic of the period, in which the more or less clear-cut linearity of former centuries no longer asserted itself.

5 To pick out as an example a period of Munich painting particularly interesting for us Hungarians, Dr. Ruhmer brought back - together with some of their minor compositions - monumental historical paintings by Kaulbach, Piloty and Ramberg on to the museum's walls. A thoroughly selected collection of genre paintings and portraits by the fashionable painters of the Gründerzeit (such as Lenbach, Keller, Diez) also found its way into the exhibition. The possibility of comparison with official art also put the anti-academic work of Leibi and his circle, which had always received emphasis, the highly idiosyncratic Hans von Marées or Böcklin and Feuerbach in a more refined light. It is perhaps enough to show how far revision in the appreciation and display of 19

th-century art was a world-wide phenomenon in the 1980s by referring to Professor Robert Rosenblum of New York who repeatedly emphasized after the 1986 opening of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris the importance of reappraisal, which France had at last also joined. "There has never been so radical a change in the history of art as in our conception of the 19

th century. What has been going on in the past twenty years amounts to a revolution against a former revolution. The modernist perspective still dominating in the middle of the 20

th century has by now lost its positions in face of the post-modernist reconstruction of the 19

th century," he wrote.

6 In his opinion, the work of an unbelievable number of lesser or greater artists who have come to be known from the most different quarters of the world, the spread of photography or the flood of visual information in the popular press of the period - to mention only a few of the newly explored aspects - had had an immense influence on the work of the greatest artist idols (such as the impressionists) who had been treated almost in isolation formerly, but ought no longer to be judged without this wider context. There is no museum building in all the world as large as to be able to present all the works of art that it should according to the principles outlined above. As ever, selection is unavoidable, as it was in the case of the Musée d'Orsay. However, the museum, by including all branches of art - i.e., apart from painting, sculpture, graphics, and applied art, also architecture and urbanism, book design, press, cinema, and, through its regular concerts, even music - in the scope of its collection and interest, it provides more comprehensive a picture of the roughly half a century between 1848 and 1906 than any museum before (as is well known, works of the first half of the 19

th century were left behind in the Louvre). Wherever it could, it sought to separate in space the various branches of art. Partly as a result of this, it could not increase the number of paintings in the desired measure, though it drew on a much wider range of works than ever before. According to the concept elaborated by Michel Laclotte and Françoise Cachin and their colleagues, all stylistic groups and all major painters, including some foreign ones, were to be represented at least by way