Temporary deposits turned permanent losses – The fate of works loaned from the collection of the National Picture Gallery to provincial museums
Part 3: Nagybánya and Torda
MúzeumCafé 38.
The idea that, within the framework of the local museum of the mining town providing a home for the Nagybánya artists’ colony, there should be a gallery to display the works of artists working there, or who had settled there, arose practically at the same time as the foundation of the colony itself, in 1896. At the time Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania) wasn’t a county centre, its population hardly reaching 10,000. Thus gifts and deposits were the preferred option. The Nagybánya Museum Association was established in 1900 and in June 1904 the local museum opened including a picture collection consisting almost entirely of works on temporary deposit – six original paintings and 26 copies – which had been transferred in December 1903 from the holdings of the National Museum of Hungarian Fine Arts. Presumably the works disappeared during the Second World War as the front passed through the town. Just one picture, the most valuable one, a painting by József Koszta, found its way back to the Museum of Fine Arts, and from there to the Hungarian National Gallery. The Hungarian Cultural House in Torda (Turda, Romania) opened in 1913. The single source of the small gallery was a deposit transferred by the Museum of Fine Arts and the Historical Gallery. After World War II the former Cultural House became a museum again. However, appropriate, specialist renovation of its valuable architectural character took place only last year. The first floor now houses Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch’s painting depicting the 1568 session of the diet in Torda which decreed religious toleration. Only one of the formerly deposited works survives. The other works have been dispersed by the storms of history.