A Brief Overview of Museums in Canada author: Joó Julianna ¶ Canada is not famous for its museums, rather for its wonderful natural endowments. With its mountains, lakes, rivers and fir trees, it has the effect of making you feel you are in another dimension, where nature dominates. For me it was the fauna and flora of the landscape which captivated me, but as an […]
Portrait Painting in the Light of Restoring An English Youth by an Unknown Artist author: Csala Ildikó During reconstruction of the Museum of Fine arts, which began in 2015, the plan is to continue restoration work and art historical research more intensively. With that in mind, attention has focussed on one of the outstanding items in the museum’s English collection, An English Youth, a portrait with the initials ‘J.M’, an unknown […]
The First Golden Age – Painting in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Kunsthalle author: Basics Beatrix ¶ The Kunsthalle in Budapest is marking the 120th anniversary of its opening with a special exhibition. It showcases the masterpieces of the period when the exhibition hall was inaugurated, the era of prosperity in the Dual Monarchy. A key concept in selecting the displayed works was that a significant number of their artists were in […]
From tablet to tablet, from scroll to scroll… author: Toronyi Zsuzsanna ¶ … thus wrote Amos and Fania Oz in their essay about the Jewish textual tradition. The references are to the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, the Torah scroll containing the five books of Moses and the connection with modern computer language. Yet the ‘connection’ is not simply a play on words. It also […]
Renaissance of the Salgótarjáni Street Jewish Cemetery author: Klein Rudolf ¶ The fist reference to Jewish funerary culture appears in the Old Testament when Abraham buried his wife Sarah (Genesis 23:1-20). However, that does not mark the beginning of Jewish funerary art, since due to its reluctance to visuality Judaism does not have a collective language of forms supported by ideas like the sacral art […]
Glittering Devotional Objects in the Shadow of the Red Star Egyházi gyűjtemények a Kádár-rendszerben author: Berényi Marianna In the 1980s when, with state support and the cooperation of different churches, new ecclesiastical art exhibitions were continuously being opened, no one brought up the past – the former liquidation of institutional networks, the nationalisation of schools, the dissolution of religious orders, the seizure and sometimes destruction of the collections they held, the persecution […]
Jewish Memorials in Terézváros Museums Established During the Kádár era due to Non-governmental Initiative author: Basics Beatrix In the 1840s the Jewish population of Pest doubled, mainly due to a law making settlement easier, and by 1848 the figure was already above 15,000. About 75% of those moving to Pest were from elsewhere in Hungary, while others came from Czech and Moravian territories of the Habsburg Empire and, to a smaller extent, […]
Self-Confidence Volunteering – Numerous Possibilities and Continuous Challenges author: Sóki Diána és Varga Lujza To mark the tenth anniversary of the volunteers’ project at the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, a conference was organised in the Hungarian National Gallery. One of the guest speakers was Kusuma Barnett, who initiated and from 1988 to 2010 lead a similar project at the British Museum. She is associated with the Volunteers for […]
The Museum Builder Interview with Architect István Mányi about the Reconstruction of the Museum of Fine arts and other Museums in Pest author: Hamvay Péter István Mányi has been drafting designs for reconstruction of the Museum of Fine Arts, which has kept stopping short, for exactly 20 years. He thinks that often an architect does not have to perform a defined task, rather he himself has to formulate his own. He fell in love with Historicism during renovation of the […]
The splendour of the Wahnfried Villa, its decline and rebirth author: Rockenbauer Zoltán The history of the Wahnfried Villa, which since 1976 has housed the Richard Wagner Museum, is almost as interesting as the life of the great composer, its first owner. The first, and indeed last home in Bayreuth of Richard Wagner, who was born in Leipzig, was built in 1872–74 behind the Hofgarten, the park attached […]