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

12. We reserved a separate room for László Paál in the new exhibition improve the lighting, we could only assemble a somewhat fractured display of works demonstrating the spread in Hungary of the new approach to nature and its various tendencies. Moreover, the selection of the works of the artists experimenting with the new is mostly comprised of small-scale pictures, and we could create units with appropriate proportions often only by hanging them one above the other. However, after the intimate plein airs of Mészöly and the early Szolnok paintings, we could operate with larger canvases by Mednyánszky and later painters. Apart from the better known Munich, Paris or Szentendre period paintings of the artists, who belonged more or less closely to the circle around Simon Hollósy, the less known naturalistic paintings of other painters of a similar outlook make the presentation of the period more complete. As in the case of the tradition-upholding trends in the other building, we sought to make references ahead and back in selecting and arranging the material of the innovators coming into their own after 1870. It is not possible to go into the details here. In the space following the Munkácsy Rooms, we displayed the socially sensitive works of the pupils and followers of the master; and, in the corridor running parallel to the Ball Room, we hung genre paintings and portraits of Munich- and Paris-trained realists, which finely echo works in similar genres in the neighbouring rooms. For hanging in the smaller space beside the stairway, we selected fashionable but valuable works of the 1890s. As in the case of the Musée d'Orsay, some disapproved of the fact that we brought back from oblivion the names of some artists who had been quite popular in their times and even several decades after the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts, their works having been kept on its walls; but, after World War II, they were not brought up from the depths of storerooms. We, however, thought it reasonable to fill the vacuum around the greatest but seemingly isolated masters by resurrecting their talented contemporaries who did produce outstanding works, and thereby present the wider context of the idolized celebrities. The only offence these wellexecuted realistic, naturalistic or plein-air pictures with a diversified subject matter ever committed was that they were deemed to belong to the frequently cursed so-called "Arts-Hall" (i.e. mainstream) painting in vogue at that time. To bring up only one example of how far it was necessary to make a more open, ideologically less motivated selection: everyone knew the name of Árpád Feszty, creator of a famous cyclorama, but the gallery of the nation would not honour him with the display of one single picture by him. This was why I chose his masterful Golgotha (1880), which still hangs opposite Munkácsy's work with the same subject matter, and stands the comparison. Several similar surprises could be listed from the last rooms of our exhibition. We have plenty of excellent, even large-scale pictures on store that are characteristic of the period, and it would be high time to display them at least at temporary exhibitions, as many other countries do in revealing the breadth and depth of their national cultures in exhibitions and in related books. The Warsaw National Museum may have been the most daring of all, for, in its permanent exhibition, it has provided a separate hall for the monumental canvases of Polish academic painting next to the room of historical paintings; and the head of the university department of art history has published a survey of Polish salon painting - a tendency which, with the exception of the one Munkácsy, has no respect in Hungary.

16 However, the end-of-the-century examples just mentioned can no longer be seen at our exhibition, as the masterpieces of the Hungarian-Plains artists, Adolf Fényes, János Tornyai, Gyula Rudnay and especially József Koszta were removed from the 20

th-century exhibition due to rearrangements at the beginning of the new millennium, and could only be hung in 13. In the first permanent exhibition of the Buda Palace the last 14. Detail of the Szinyei Merse room in the present exhibition section of the U-shaped series of rooms was closed with Picnic in May by Pál Szinyei Merse. Photograph made around 1980