What kind of professional perspectives should be applied to the large-scale exhibition of Transylvanian art planned by the Hungarian National Gallery?
Milyen szakmai szempontokat kell ehhez számba venni?
MúzeumCafé 42.
György Szücs, art historian, deputy director of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, curator of the exhibition: Zoltán Banner’s Transylvanian Hungarian Art in the 20th Century was published in Budapest in 1990. For the first time, it aimed to deal with the development of fine arts in the given region and tried to identify the characteristic features on the basis of which the subject could be explored. Beyond the proximity of the about-to-end period, the personal experience of the author – who wasn’t simply a recorder but also a creative actor in Transylvanian cultural life – was partly of documentary value and partly resulted in bias, precisely because of the sense of duty for the display of minority values in opposition to the then dictatorship. Thus at the time of writing it was difficult to assert purely aesthetic points of view and almost impossible to preserve an otherwise expected objectivity. Since that time 25 years have passed, but the continuation of the then existing problems of nationality and politics from the aspect of the participants in today’s Transylvanian art has provided little possibility for the formation of a perspective from a distance, which a foreign researcher – in Hungary – simply considering the examinable material of the subject, can manage to form successfully from the outside. Thus the question is whether the two types of experience and simultaneous evaluation of knowledge lead to a sensible synthesis. In other words, is there the possibility of staging an exhibition about Transylvanian Hungarian arts that is valid for everyone, or at least many, which can be staged in both Hungary and Romania? A model which is aiming at the essence and which has to be simple cannot be exclusive.