Exhibition perspectives – changes at the Kassák Museum
MúzeumCafé 20.
The Kassák Museum is housed in a Baroque building, which is rather curious since Lajos Kassák was an internationally renowned figure of modernism, though the history of the institution itself is somewhat unusual and it has involved some obscure issues. If the plans of the new museum management are realised the Baroque will remain, but the museum will provide the public with clearer understanding. Art historian Edit Sasvári was appointed the museum’s new director in autumn 2010. She says she is building on the concepts of her predecessors, Ferenc Csaplár and Gábor Andrási. The Kassák Museum opened in 1976. Its first director, Ferenc Csaplár, remained in place for more than three decades. “The establishment of the museum,” he once said in an interview, “was an important step in the rehabilitation of modern Hungarian art – primarily of one of the most controversial (and attacked) avant-garde trends, constructivism, which from being tolerated has become accepted, or at least has gained its ‘civil rights’.” The personality of the committed left-wing, albeit independent Kassák was rather problematic for the official Party. Probably it was due to his international reputation that the museum was established nine years after his death. It remains a question, however, why the works of this world-renown representative of modernism were put on display in an apartment-like space leading from a staircase of the Baroque Zichy Mansion in Old Buda. The core of the collection comprises works by and portraits of Kassák. In addition there are items he received as gifts from colleagues in Hungary and abroad. There are photographs of Kassák and a number of foreign avant-garde artists. A rich manuscript collection allows us to appreciate Kassák as both a writer and political organiser, and there are numerous forgotten, still unpublished documents.