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

10. The air-conditioned glass-case system in the building of the High Court with paintings by Munkácsy and Paál, 1960s 11. Detail of the rearranged Munkácsy rooms new enthusiasts - as I have had occasion to note from both foreign and domestic echoes. (Ills. 10-11) László Paál is usually presented in one space with Munkácsy. When the National Gallery was opened in the building of the High Court, their works were put together in all three halls and even in the exit corridor (no one knows what this fragmentation was for). It was only Elek Petrovics's arrangement that had afforded them a separate hall each in the Museum of Fine Arts in 1920. This we could not do for technical exigencies, but I at least kept one room in the series together with the majority of the walls opposite exclusively for Paál. (111. 12) In the adjacent room, I surrounded three emblematic Munkácsys with some of the masterworks of his friend - holding on to the well-proved method of our predecessors in arranging the exhibition, Gábor Ö. Pogány and Éva Bodnár. My colleague, Zsuzsanna Bakó, could also have recourse to certain elements of the selection that had been employed in the High Court in her series of rooms displaying in particular the works of the Age of Reform. Director Pogány had had a larg material to choose from, thanks especially to the well-researched acquisitions policies of the Municipal Gallery, which had been directed by Jenő Kopp from 1933 to 1944 and later incorporated into the National Gallery. In other respects, we could no longer use the principles of mixed arrangement Pogány had used in accordance with the ^-century exhibition in the High Court.

15 He had not set up any one-man room, had mixed styles, and had not even taken into account the academies putting the artists on their ways. His arrangement was no doubt beautiful, variegated, but it made the recognition of different aspirations, the orientation of more attentive visitors and guides more difficult. For example, it mixed the work of Lötz, a master with Viennese connections, with that of Benczúr, who represented a quite different character, and of the other Munich-trained masters (111. 9); it mingled Szinyei Merse's paintings with those of Géza Mészöly and Béla Pállik. For my part, I could only imagine Mészöly in the company of Deák-Ébner and the early Szolnok artists - these, however, had been left out of Pogány's arrangement. With his Picnic in May (1873), Szinyei Merse had been such a lonely pioneer who now certainly deserved special treatment. We found him a place in a smaller space leading to the Ball Room, which facilitated a one-man Pál Szinyei Merse show. (Ills. 1314) Thus, apart from Munkácsy, the other master of ours who had had the greatest influence on 20

th-century Hungarian painting, was afforded a gallery of his own. Being a small room with few wall surfaces, we had to have its windows bricked up. Lighting is therefore artificial, the colour-distorting effects of which could not be countered even after modernization, with lamps whose colour frequency is close to the sun. This problem does not arise with all artists, but Szinyei is one of our most colourful painters, and bad lighting has a distortive effect on his broad and intensive range of colours. The highly segmented ground plan of Building B facilitated a presentation outlining the most immediate artistic environment of the two school-creating great masters in the spaces adjoining theirs. This was how works by artists following in the footsteps of Munkácsy were placed at the exit of the Munkácsy Rooms. In the corridor between the Munkácsy Rooms and the Szinyei Room, I put up a small assortment of paintings by artists who had circled around Szinyei in Munich around 1870 and demonstrated an interest in modern pictorial attitudes. His audacious colouring and relaxed treatment had influenced all these painters, though they all made their names as historical painters. The most surprising among them was Géza Dósa, especially after being able to strengthen his presence by a new acquisition in 2001 (Mother with Her Children, 1870). Szinyei Merse and his associates had tried their most daring innovations in ingenious little sketches, and we exhibited some of these in a glass case. On the wall nearest the Munkácsy Rooms, we hung the works of Sándor Wagner, the teacher of both great masters in Munich. Leaving the small Szinyei Room, we enter the space of the Buda Royal Palace whose post-war reconstruction is perhaps the most problematic. The former Ball Room with its great interior height is, in my view too, neither modern nor archaizing enough, and it is certainly difficult to accommodate it in its current form for exhibiting works of art (the idea of having it separated into two floors with a loft or otherwise has been brought up). It is no mere coincidence that we ourselves, as had our predecessors, first wanted to put up the monumental historical paintings in this space. After the changes in conception, we attempted the impossible, creating a system of screens that enabled the presentation of different artistic groups and aspirations separately but also as converging into a process. (Ills. 3^4) Lacking the possibility to at least partly brick up the many windows and doors of the room and to