Fittings and fixtures, a statue with drawers, art collecting and patronage MúzeumCafé 16. author: Erzsébet Eszéki German entrepreneur Reinhold Würth has managed the family company since 1954. Currently the concern is involved in fixing and assembly materials, and operates in 86 countries. Mr Würth is a collector and patron of art. Today the Würth collection comprises 12,000 items and a special museum has been created for them. In 2009 the Würth […]
Veils of oblivion A conversation with Katalin Sinkó MúzeumCafé 16. author: Orsolya Radványi The volume on the 50-year history of the Hungarian National Gallery published last year was acclaimed as the best critical text by the Hungarian Section of AICA. It follows the history of the National Gallery from the idea of its foundation at the start of the 19th century to the present with thorough attention and […]
The young infanta without a passport Associate Director of the Prado Gabriele Finaldi on rescuing paintings MúzeumCafé 16. author: Eszter Szablyár Gabriele Finaldi was born in London in 1965. After studying in England and Italy, he gained his doctorate on the oeuvre of the Spanish Baroque painter Jusepe de Ribera at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In 1992 he was appointed curator of the National Gallery’s Collection of Late Italian and Spanish Painting. Ten […]
Kosztolányi’s coffee cup or sumptuous entertaining on a shoestring MúzeumCafé 16. author: Ádám Sztankay The Museum of Hungarian Trade and Catering is unique. The idea for such a museum was raised in the 19th century, though the present institution opened on the ground floor of the former Fortuna Inn on Castle Hill in 1966. One of the first directors of the museum, which reflects the traditions and displays items […]
The urban context of museums Part 2: The Neues Museum, Berlin MúzeumCafé 16. author: Péter György In 1840, a decade after the Altes Museum opened, the Prussian king Frederick William III commissioned August Stüler, a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to design a new museum. The nature of the collections and the changes in theoretical approaches to art accounted for the essential difference between the two museums. While the Altes Museum […]
A congregation’s house – a gallery – a second-hand clothes shop Former synagogues in Hungary MúzeumCafé 16. author: Zsuzsanna Toronyi, curator, hungarian jewish museum and archive The synagogue is not a temple. In Judaism the temple signifies the two biblical Jerusalem sanctuaries which all Jews tried to reach on pilgrimage holidays. In line with medieval prohibitions, synagogues could not directly open onto streets and thus were built in the Jewish quarter inside a ‘judenhof’ (Jewish courtyard) on a protected plot surrounded […]
The Valley of Thracian Kings MúzeumCafé 16. author: Csilla Kőfalvi, director of Hungarian Poster House An area in the vicinity of Kazanlak in Bulgaria was a site of major royal burials in ancient times. Kazanlak, a town in the Stara Zagora province of Bulgaria, was bombed on 19 April 1944 with the result that a Thracian tomb dating from the turn of the 3rd and 4th century B.C. was revealed. […]
Mobilizing museums MúzeumCafé 16. author: Katalin Magyar Nothing better demonstrates how complicated it is to make museums accessible to people with limited mobility than the experience of participants in wheelchairs at a conference on the theme in the Palace of Arts, the home of the Ludwig Museum. Parking was free, but only for a limited time. The chairlift leading to the buffet […]
The rebirth of a rare musical instrument And traces of its history MúzeumCafé 16. author: Balázs Remsey, art historian, Museum of Applied Arts A Pleyel piano dating from 1898 is held in the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts. With the opening of the Chopin Year the public could see and hear it for the first time. The musical instrument collection of the Applied Arts Museum does not constitute an independent department but is part of the museum’s furniture […]
Pride and Prejudice The fake, the art historian and the “blockbuster” MúzeumCafé 16. author: László Török, Academician, institute of archaeology, hungarian academy of sciences At the end of the 1970s I once asked Bernard Bothmer, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the Brooklyn Museum and one of the greatest historians of Egyptian art, how his predecessor in the museum, John D. Cooney, was able to buy such a large number of faked Coptic sculptures and subscribe to the absurd theory […]