Municipal Picture Gallery – past and present – Fine Arts in the Budapest History Museum’s Kiscell Museum
MúzeumCafé 13.
The National Exhibition of 1885 resulted in the establishment of the Municipal Museum. The decision to set it up was taken in 1887 but its actual opening took place only following the 1896 Millennium exhibition. For Bálint Kuzsinszky, the first director, fine arts represented tools for documentation. That concept characterised the first exhibition during the mayoralty of István Bárczy. The development of the Municipal Museum has reflected the ongoing changes in the aesthetic and historical principles of collection and display. The Municipal Picture Gallery opened in 1933. It contained works of art held by the municipality, Count Jenő Zichy’s collection and the estate of Károly Lotz. Reorganisation in the last decades of the 19th century resulted in the present institutional structure. Significant historical works of art were included in the Historical Picture Gallery established in 1884 in the National Museum’s Gallery, while those more important aesthetically were added to the subsequent Museum of Fine Arts. The Municipal Picture Gallery reopened after the war in 1946 and the story from a good half a century before was repeated: it first separated from the Municipal Museums as a “non-historical collection”. In 1951 art objects relating to the city’s history were handed back to the capital’s history museum and then the material purchased for “purely aesthetic reasons” became included in the National Picture Gallery as part of the Museum of Fine Arts. From there they entered the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery in 1957. The ‘rest’ became part of the collection held by the Kiscell Museum.