Exhibitions in an art nouveau town hall
The Subotica Municipal Museum and the Vojvodina Hungarian Art Gallery
MúzeumCafé 50.
The foundation of the Szabadka (today Subotica, Serbia) Museum is linked with events of 120 years ago. In a document dated 13 July 1873, the Hungarian Royal Ministry for Religion and Public Education expressed the desire that the scientific and artistic collections in the country be spread as widely as possible, including in the provincial areas, by means of societies promoting the sciences and the arts. From the late 1860s, the appearance of a railway link greatly contributed to accelerating the rate of civic progress in the town as it experienced the start of development. The teaching staff of the local grammar school strongly supported the initiatives for founding a museum. Among the teachers there was István Iványi, who until 1895 was the librarian of the town’s National Club, and who in 1883 was one of the founders and vice-presidents of the Bács-Bodrog County Historical Society. He established the Municipal Public Library and from 1892 was its first librarian. He was also a local historian, whose work appeared in two volumes, in 1886 and 1892. His autobiography, Reflections on the Course of My Life, was published in Subotica in 1974. There was also Ödön Gohl, who taught classics at the school and who in 1887 took charge of the school’s coin collection. Following publication of his Coins of the Roman Empire, he was invited to the Hungarian National Museum, where he worked – from 1914 as the head of the coins and medals collection – until his retirement in 1925. It was Gohl who purchased most of the Ede Telcs medals held in the National Museum. (Telcs had been a pupil at the grammar school.) In Szabadka the library appeared first, its statutes being officially endorsed in 1892. In 1894 its range of activities expanded with the increase of archaeological items, coins, medals and other objects. In 1895 the library was officially designated the Szabadka Public Library and Museum Association. Archaeology played the leading role until 1899, when other specialist activities appeared. The arts were first mentioned in a 1901 list under ‘antiquities’, with reference to an altarpiece from 1790 under ‘Weapons of Modern Time’, while a bust of the poet Vörösmarty and a relief of King Matthias Corvinus and his wife Beatrix were included among ‘objects of reverence’. According to a 1906 inventory, together with these there were now busts of Lajos Kossuth and Ferenc Deák, a statue of Vörösmarty by Ede Telcs and Crown and Sword, a historical painting by Antal Szirmai (Schnier). This truly represented the then situation of the fine arts in the town. After the Public Library and Museum Association had ceased functioning in 1906, construction of the new Art Nouveau Town Hall created a new situation. The historical portrait gallery of the old Town Hall was moved here and remained almost intact in the collection of the Szabadka Municipal Museum, similarly to the donation made by the architect Géza Lencz. In 1909 Lencz donated, inter alia, seven oil paintings
– portraits of the Rudics family – to the museum’s collec-tion, including some which were by József Schmidt, dating from 1820-1830. Today these pictures are among the oldest works in the museum’s art collection. During the political upheavals of 1918 several of the museum’s artworks either disappeared or were destroyed. The works were stored on the fourth floor of the Town Hall in the so-called Museum and fortunately they remained there when other parts of the museum collection were transferred to the grammar school. The stock of items thus transferred steadily diminished until disappearing completely during the Second World War. Meanwhile, during the interwar period the Bácskai Museum opened in Szabadka (now Subotica) as the only private museum in Vojvodina. The Subotica Municipal Museum was established with that name in 1948, following a decree of 2 November 1946 calling for the establishment of archives, libraries and museums in every large town in Vojvodina. The institute opened on Constitution Day (29 November) in 1949 in the Art Nouveau Raichl mansion, from where it moved in 1967 to the Art Nouveau Town Hall. At the time of opening, four ground-floor rooms of the mansion’s neighbouring building provided a home for the natural history collection and the picture gallery. In 1967 the Subotica Municipal Museum returned to its old place, the building of the Town Hall. In that year, the Local History Picture Gallery and a display of old masters as well as paintings by Sándor Oláh opened on 22 December on the first floor. With the move in 2008 of the entire Municipal Museum from the old Town Hall to its current location, the Art Nouveau apartment block built for Miksa Dömötör in 1906, the possibility arose for staging longer exhibitions of the fine arts. Reopening the Vojvodina Hungarian Picture Gallery (1830-1930) was one of the strategic aims of the Hungarian National Council for the period 2012–2018, and on 28 March 2014 this became a reality with the support of the Hungarian government and the Gábor Bethlen Foundation. The current display covers an area of 200 square metres. The museum’s permanent exhibition includes archaeology, history, folk art, natural history and the fine arts. Along with preparatory work for the Vojvodina Hungarian Picture Gallery, the building’s loft has been converted to house exhibitions. One of the tasks of the Hungarian National Council’s cultural strategy is to present the Vojvodina Hungarian Picture Gallery’s post-1930 Vojvodina Hungarian fine arts in the Senta Municipal Museum, where the collection is certainly rich enough for this purpose – thanks in part to the Senta Artists’ Colony, founded in 1952, and partly to the increasing donations from the 1970s of Margit Tóth Thiel. The Vojvodina Hungarian Picture Gallery is of regional, not just local character, which indicates further tasks for its public promotion. More visitors can be drawn by museum education activities, presentations and other events. Next year there will be a new exhibition in the Picture Gallery, Sándor Oláh and his Contemporaries, and also on display will be trophies acquired outside Europe by Oszkár Vojnich (1864–1914), as well as his ethnographic collection and photographs. Resulting from the comprehensive nature of the museum, exhibitions of various lengths covering natural history, folk art, archaeological and other themes are often staged. The permanent archaeological and natural history exhibition is set to open in the loft gallery next year. At the same time, there are temporary exhibitions from the art collection, or by means of donated collections. Last but not least, due to its character of covering general Hungarian arts, the Vojvodina Hungarian Picture Gallery requires cross-border promotion – as exemplified by the publication of this current text.