Rippl-Rónai altar and a japanese-style fire-screen from paris MúzeumCafé 19. author: János Horváth, art historian, chief museologist of the Rippl-Rónai Museum The exhibition Rippl-Rónai and the Nabis displaying the artist’s ‘black’ period was organised by Kaposvár’s Rippl-Rónai Museum last May. The homogeneity of the 80 paintings offered a special experience and new lessons. Twenty lithographs of works by Nabis artists – Gauguin, Lautrec, Carrière and Redon – demonstrated the relations with contemporary Parisian painting. The sensations […]
Metal detectors and a Southern Great Plain archaeological excavation MúzeumCafé 19. author: Viktor Csányi archaeologist, Tornyai János Museum Hódmezővásárhely Today a wide range of means are used to unearth finds and discover sites, including metal detectors, radar, magnetism and aerial photography. Due to the simplicity of their use and their results, metal detectors are the most widely used. These easily accessible and relatively inexpensive tools can now be found in the majority of museums. […]
New track of M0 motorway reveals more than 100 Scythian graves – Budapest History Museum MúzeumCafé 19. author: Zoltán Bencze archaeologist, bhm head of medieval department Mention ‘Scythian’ in Hungary and most people associate the word with a stag, its legs folded underneath, made of electrum (an alloy of gold and silver) and found in the Tápiószentmárton kurgan in 1923, as well as a stag looking back made of gold leaf excavated at Mezőkeresztes-Zöldhalompuszta in 1928. Both most likely decorated an […]
Szöged – new, permanent ethnographic exhibition in Szeged’s Móra Ferenc Museum The ‘Szöged nation’ of ethnographer Sándor Bálint MúzeumCafé 19. author: Ildikó Bárkányi, ethnographer, museologist The new, permanent exhibition focuses on the essence of Szeged, rather than folk-art-centred ethnographic displays as previously, though our aims were presumably similar to those of the 1960s organisers. For theoretical background we were able to rely on the research of Szeged-born – or Szeged-related – nationally prominent and even European renowned ethnographers. The researcher […]
How does new legislation change the situation and potential of archaeological explorations? MúzeumCafé 19. Paula Zsidi Archaeologist, deputy director of the Budapest History Museum: Law 2010/LXIX on the protection of cultural heritage modifying Law 2001/LXIV came into force on 1 August. The situation induced by a regulation modification in 2007 was characterised as a burst in the damn in a 2008 study discussing the role of archaeology in the […]
The love affair between money and museums Private capital, public collections and the Kovásznai exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery MúzeumCafé 19. author: Kriszta Dékei The György Kovásznai retrospective held in the Hungarian National Gallery (5 June – 26 September 2010) raises several issues and problems. The exhibition can be viewed as reflecting a special connection between private capital embodied in the art collector and a public art collection, which relation already characterises a variety of constructions in Hungary. In […]
Sándor Radnóti, aesthetician A museum today is the central metaphor of intellectual life MúzeumCafé 18. author: Gellért Rajcsányi It could have been the Museum of Fine Arts I first visited – I know the Old Masters collection inside out. When we set off on Sundays we would often visit museums. Thus I became well familiar with the Christian Museum in Esztergom. I perhaps first saw Goya’s The Clothed Maja and The Nude Maja […]
The state’s principles vis-à-vis the fine arts are not laid down Interview with József Mélyi, art critic, new president of AICA’s Hungarian Section MúzeumCafé 18. author: Erzsébet Marton Art critic József Mélyi regularly writes about contemporary art and occasionally works as a curator. He has recently been elected president of the Hungarian section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). I asked him about his aims in connection the organisation as well as his own work as an art critic, the role […]
Thinking of the source Péter G. Tóth, historian, ethnographer, new Head of Collections, Museum of Ethnography, Budapest MúzeumCafé 18. author: Roland Borsos The Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology at Pécs University underwent renewal in the 1990s. Several noted professors were invited to teach, including Éva Pócs who had been heading a project with Gábor Klaniczay for nearly ten years, exploring the sources of witchcraft and witch-hunting in the Early Modern Age. Since then the research, based […]
Archangels meet on a photographic glass sheet Csilla E. Csorba, director of the Petőfi Museum of Literature MúzeumCafé 18. author: Eszter Szablyár I wrote my degree theses about Dániel Irányi, who emigrated to Paris after the 1848–49 War of Independence, and his revolutionary ideas published in French papers. Then someone working in the Petőfi Museum of Literature all of a sudden suggested that I try the museum. So I applied. I was taken on for a trial […]