The Old Masters Gallery – A treasure unknown to many

An art-loving family, a middle class lifestyle, then a victim of political changes. Nothing was easy. Nothing just fell into her lap. More recognition across the world than in Hungary. In summary, those are the essential elements of the career of Zsuzsa Urbach, former head of the Museum of Fine Arts’ Old Masters Gallery. Due to her origins, she started out from a disadvantaged position, yet she became an internationally renowned expert in 15th and 16th century Flemish and German painting, as well as Christian iconography, and she became a pioneer in Hungary of the technical examination of paintings. After Andor Pigler and Klára Garas, she took over leadership of the world-standard Old Masters Gallery. Her career was crowned with the establishment of the Art History Department of Péter Pázmány Catholic University, which she headed for a decade. The results of her academic work have appeared in countless Hungarian and international publications. As a lecturer, she is well remembered by several generations. Today she is happy that her three decades of research into the Flemish collection of the Museum of Fine Arts has resulted in a volume published in London. She is currently organising her notes and documents accumulated as a researcher, and as a genuine teacher she is generously distributing them among her young colleagues and students

 – Your father was a car racer and manufacturer. For you this was a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Indeed, because while I am proud that the Mátra motorcycle he designed is exhibited in the Transport Museum, my origins strongly hindered me at the beginning. Rippl-Rónai used to have lunch with my grandfather, while my grandmother, who was self-educated, was an accomplished collector. In the inter-war period she travelled widely in Italy. I formed my earliest impressions about art from her postcard collection and the books she brought from abroad, but my parents were also art lovers. In 1945, when I was in my first year at school, I met a girl who had similar interests. We used her family’s library a lot, since theirs still existed – there wasn’t much left of ours after a bomb hit it. My class teacher at the grammar school, who had studied art history before the war, had a great effect on me. I founded an art history society in the school and gave talks. I finished school in 1952 but I couldn’t be admitted anywhere since there were three black marks against my name: bourgeois, capitalist and attending a religious school. I fell to pieces, but somehow I got involved with the Castle excavations directed by László Gerevich. My job included cleaning the tiles. I reckon I was working illegally alongside several great medieval archaeology specialists. My father, who was working as a manual worker, went to see the Party secretary saying that while he accepted being punished himself, he objected to his daughter being treated negatively. The secretary promised that if I was successful in the entrance exam a way would be found – and it also helped, of course, that at the time I was working as an unskilled worker.

 – So you got to university a couple of years late. What do you remember about that time?

There were crazy disputes with my lecturers because I wasn’t enthusiastic about either Hollósy’s Corn Husking or The Mourning of László Hunyadi. I finished my art history studies with a feeling that something was greatly lacking. Unofficially I went over to the lectures about medieval archaeology. We studied concrete matters – findings and objects – and there were unbelievably good lectures about medieval literature. Apart from practical excavations, I completed the studies and thus when in 1962-63 the Ph.D diploma was reinstated, I was among the first to do a doctorate since I had completed two subjects. I was in my fourth year when the revolution broke out. My boyfriend and fellow student went to Switzerland. I asked for a passport, and though we agreed in Paris that our relationship was over, my papers were valid for two years and so I remained abroad. Helped by my father’s old friends I first went to Munich, where I enrolled with Hans Sedlmayr. Then in London I studied at the Courtauld Institute for half a year. In between, I worked as a waitress, a German translator and a picture editor in order to maintain myself.

 – What made you decide to return to Hungary?

First of all, I had time for the decision. I had completed four years at Budapest University but there still remained one year of practice and writing the thesis. I postponed this. I travelled around Europe, back-packing, and with my English girlfriend visited galleries and museums. After two years, in 1959, I decided to return. I spent my trainee year at the Museum of Fine Arts with Dénes Radocsay. I learnt a great deal from him. He was a family friend, too, and I considered him my mentor. He very much liked my thesis about Master MS. Nevertheless, I remained without a job after graduating. There was no question about a museum in the provinces, since I was planning to get married. Yet I had to work. Thus while I was writing my doctorate about the flower symbolism of The Visitation I was supervising the working of the suburban fine arts, photo and film section of the Municipal Council’s cultural department. I gained an awful lot of experience and those times taught me humility and respect, in that that there are ordinary, uneducated people who draw, paint, take photographs and make films with all their energy and make great sacrifices to do so.

 – Before you got to the Museum of Fine Arts there was a period at Corvina Publishers.

Earlier I had transferred to the building department of the city council, to the people dealing with listed buildings. However, I didn’t want to get involved with architecture. Then my friend Miklós Boskovits told me that a place had become vacant at Corvina and I should go there. Two fantastic years followed, although my name appears in few publications since the books took such a long time to prepare that by the time they were published I had already left. András Tömpe was the director. He was supposed to stand for orthodox communist management, but he stood for everything apart from that. However, working there were many of the Social Democrats who had been in prison, including Pál Justus, László Pödör and Györgyi Tarisznyás. They had tremendous knowledge and experience of life. We younger ones simply absorbed all we could from what they said about life, the world and history. The editorial office used to receive foreign specialist journals – Tömpe was a truly liberal director. When I was editing Lajos Németh’s book about Csontváry I said to him that in Csontváry’s writings God was a person and that, although according to the then official handbook of writing style we should use a small letter, in this case we should make an exception. He immediately agreed, which showed great courage on his part. When the Fine Arts Publishing House ceased to operate and merged with Corvina, János Végh and Ágnes Körber arrived, but I could also work with Kata Kálmán. Very serious art publications were thus produced. Yet despite the good times I didn’t want to spend my entire life editing, thus when I was working on a volume by Klára Garas I told her that I’d like to return to the Museum of Fine Arts. At first she didn’t understand, since they could pay a lot less, but I was happy to go when a place became available in the Old Masters Gallery. At the age of 33 – rather late – I started working at the museum

 – Is there an exhibition, book or study which you regard as your life’s chief work?

All my life I’ve been dealing with the Gothic, though that has never really been an exhibition theme at the Fine Arts Museum … maybe the Sigismund exhibition was the only one. My doctoral dissertation about Master MS was published and certainly that’s eternal love.

 – Is it a love shared by your former fellow student Miklós Mojzer?

Indeed. The story began when we were in the fourth year at university. It was suggested that the three of us – Boskovits, Mojzer and myself – should get together to prepare our seminar paper about Master MS. In the end, everyone remained faithful to him, though Boskovits didn’t have anything published. Mojzer, however, would have started to research the early documentation if the Slovaks had allowed it. My first task in the museum came from Dénes Radocsay, who asked me to look into an Hieronymus Bosch copy held in storage. I said: “Dénes, is there any literature about Bosch in Hungary?” There was nothing and so I spent more than a year working on it, and there was an article published in the Bulletin in 1969. Decades later it turned out that on the basis of that a Bosch copy critique had been born. It turned out across the world that there were hundreds of contemporary copies of the well-known, great works of this master, which up to then no one had examined. My article appeared to have had a great impact on international research. It’s even referred to today. I myself have returned to the theme a number of times and have kept writing about it. Another of my discoveries was a work of Hans Baldung Grien, which Andor Pigler wrote about under the title Mourning Saint. How come the great iconographer didn’t know that this was Mary, a Mater Dolorosa? We didn’t have any sophisticated technology, but I took the painting to the restorers saying that somewhere there must be a sword in the picture. It was cleaned and X-rayed, and sure enough they found traces of a sword, an outline, since at some point it had been erased from the picture. In addition to this, our gallery work to this day concerns supplementing Andor Pigler’s catalogue, which was published in 1967 and which for a long time was unparalleled. It’s a characteristic of our discipline that a catalogue ceases to be up-to-date as soon as it is published.

 – What’s your opinion of the Fine Arts Museum’s Old Masters Gallery collection? What are its strengths and what’s lacking?

For me it is the summit of the world. These days in Hungary, few people know that the Fine Arts Museum’s Old Masters Gallery is such a great treasure. People don’t realise that. It’s always compared to the royal collections, yet this isn’t the Louvre or the royal Prussian collection, but the equivalent of the National Gallery in London, which aristocrats, citizens, skilled collectors and scholarly curators have assembled, and which at most is supplemented by crumbs of the imperial collection. When I was at the Courtauld Institute, János (Johannes) Wilde, the keeper of the queen’s collection, was teaching there. He told his students in London in 1958 that if someone wanted to get to know European art history as a process they had to go to Budapest. The Budapest collection, alone among the world’s galleries, presents the context of art history in terms of every school, every tendency – not with the main works, but from the perhaps lesser masters it draws together the fabric, in terms of sources, trends and schools, and how they originated. I know that we have no Infante by Velazquez, but still. The Old Masters Gallery is not really utilized, yet it would be perfectly suitable for staging small exhibitions and for publishing a series about workshops, genres, schools, themes and continuities, namely about genuine art history. We are always looking for masterpieces, but for historical reasons the masterpieces are found elsewhere. This has to be acknowledged. Of course, we have some, and when a foreign colleague comes here he or she practically screams aloud about the discoveries. Decades ago an anecdote was circulating around the world’s museums: “Are you planning an exhibition? Are you lacking something? Ask Budapest – they have everything!” I think it’s a tragedy that acquisitions have essentially ceased, whereas in a museum there’s no stopping, particularly with a civic collection. Make no mistake, you have to buy what’s in the country!

 – The museum was able to make purchases when the art market was small and people willingly gave up their old pictures. Did you participate in such purchases?

Of course, since I was head of department twice. I went to auctions numerous times with Ildikó Ember. We calculated and allocated, and if we left something out then it was easier to buy another one, since more money remained. We went to the state-owned commission dealer’s to inspect things every week. They brought out the pictures, since among a thousand worthless items there would always be one which was worth taking to the museum. It’s not the best idea if a private person makes a purchase and deposits it for a while with the museum, since in that way the public collection doesn’t expand.

 – You were a pioneer in Hungary regarding the introduction of technical examinations. Where did your affinity for this come from?

When I started at the museum there was already an agreement with the Belgians whereby every year a restorer and an art historian would go to do research at the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, which was – and still is – one of Europe’s leading workshops. The restorers got 6-8 months to do research, and the art historians 2-3 months. My turn came in 1969. I believe I was the only one to really spend most of the scholarship period mainly in the room housing the photo collection of all the surviving 15th-century Flemish paintings and virtually the entire literature. It was there, for example, that they restored the Ghent Altarpiece. At that time they worked out new kinds of technical examination methods, which naturally I didn’t understand very well, only their use. But I tried to learn everything I could. The institute became my second home. I made life-long friends and as long as my health permitted I went back every year. On the first occasion, when I returned to Hungary after three months, I said to Klára Garas that the works of art were examined by chemists and physicists in the laboratory and that we should do the same. She understood my intention, but where would the finance and the technology come from? Even in Britain they started to deal with such matters only after the war when the National Gallery’s paintings were taken back having been stored in a salt mine and after a long discussion they started to investigate how they could clean and preserve the works.

 – You retired relatively early, but you didn’t withdraw from the profession.

That’s right. I retired when I was 59, in 1992, ‘thanks’ to the then director. Yet the situation was that, like other retired colleagues, I would also be on contract, though I never got an actual contract from the museum, but Ildikó Ember, my successor, left my desk free and they continued to consider me a member of the department. I even worked as a messenger, namely I escorted paintings and from my own money I extended the period of time, so I could do a bit of research. I got fed up with early retirement and then Miklós Maróth, sought me out and said that a second art history department was needed, alongside that of ELTE. I hadn’t a clue what a university was all about. I was a museologist.

 – But had you taught at a university before?

I had taught throughout and led sessions on art history, folk studies and aesthetics, later at the CEU as well. There were always ‘free university’ lectures at the Fine Arts Museum, with full houses. We issued programme notes for them and we had posters printed for the trams. There were some society ladies who attended the events and families could afford to buy tickets for the museum and the lectures. Returning to the university, as a classical philologist Miklós Maróth knew that there had to be another department, but Ernő Marosi and those around him wouldn’t let him start it outside Budapest. In vain did Szeged, Pécs and Debrecen come forward. They are fine, they said, but there can be no university without the specialist library of the Fine Arts Museum. Thus the idea of the Pázmány was raised, because of geographical proximity. Béla Zsolt Szakács was invited there. He had taken exams with me several times and he became an outstanding successor of mine. There was a big meeting where we discussed what the department should be like. Maróth would have liked to give the students concrete materials, and clearly that’s why he entrusted me with heading the department. The accreditation committee was given a string of requests from the departments, but for a while it didn’t issue any except for ours, which was granted without any counter-proposal. My opinion was that historic building, museum, publishing and art trade specialists have to be trained. Let’s have no splendid isolation. Let’s put something into the hands of the next generation. Apart from art history, you also have to learn how to live from this profession. It was a memorable 11 years in my life. Then Ágota Varga, a former student of mine, picture conservator András Fáy and I began to write the Netherlandish catalogue of the Old Masters Gallery. I continually reported on the research at conferences abroad and in publications. For this I got a three-year contract from the museum, but the museum didn’t take on publication itself, it just gave the rights free to the publisher. I also had to obtain sponsors, so there is no fee, but in the end it is being published in two volumes. This will be the first work relating to Hungary featuring technical examinations and underdrawings. However, needless to say there was no recognition or prize presented to me in Hungary. I have, however, received the lifetime award established by György Soros and won the Fülep Lajos Prize, though these were not due to recommenda-tions by the museum.