Tátrai Vilmos szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 95. (Budapest, 2001)

The Museum of Fine Arts in 2000

THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS IN 2000 In 2000 the reconstruction of the Museum building went on slower than planned. The restoration of the City Park wing and the interior of the Doric Hall were completed. In the Doric Hall, the original architectonic forms and decorative painting became visible and the series of plaster reliefs adorning the walls and the frieze above the colonnade have also been revealed. The painting of the exterior of the building looking on the City Park was also finished. The first floor gallery rooms, however, could not be opened. The most momentous event was the opening of the Baroque Hall after a full reconstruction with a presentation of Italian Seicento Painting (fig. 97). Originally designed to present plaster cast copies, the renewed Baroque Hall - opened to the public with the promise of continuous enlargement - is one of the finest and most spacious rooms of the Museum with paintings and statues on display. One of the most momentous acquisitions of the past decades - and perhaps the whole history of the Museum - was successfully completed this year. From large budgetary and considerable sponsorial support, the largest intact piece of the relief of Actium, an outstanding relic of imperial Rome, could be purchased (fig. 91). Two smaller relief fragments of the altar were already in the Antique Collection of the Museum. It was also in 2000 that the most successful 20

th century temporary exhibition of recent years - works by Klee, Tanguy and Miró (fig. 99) - was staged at the Museum, as was the festive architectural exhibition about the parliament (The House of the Nation) as a continuation to the Schickedanz exhibition of 1996. One of most representative scientific catalogues was published as a follow-up to that exhibition. As in the last years, the restoration of paintings in the Old Masters' Gallery concentrated on Italian Baroque art. Due to foreign support there were some exceptions. The most important of these is the restoration of the huge Entombment of the Virgin by Civerchio (fig. 95). Several restorations, in preparation of an exhibition involving major Italian Renaissance artworks planned for the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal to open in the spring of 2002, began in the second part of the year. A major scientific achievement pursued at the Museum (in cooperation with the Institute of Art History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) was the organization of the Belgian-Hungarian art historical conference to analyse Flemish works in Hungary. The staff of the Old Masters' department took part with readings and the presentation of the collection. Specialists from the Museum offered many lectures at a professional conference held in Ráckeve in the autumn of 2000. The catalogue of the Cypriote collection of the Department of Antiquities as well as the second volume - the Low Countries - of the check-list series of the Old Masters' Gallery came out as major achievements of the year. The professional periodical of the Museum, the bilingual