On the occasion of Klára Garas’s 90th birthday
MúzeumCafé 11.
Klára Garas has had an extremely rich career in the Museum of Fine Arts where she rose from being a museum attendant to the post of general director. She is still the only woman ever to have become the director of a national museum in Hungary. A doctor of arts and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Klára Garas has received several state and professional awards, but she is most proud of her imposingly long list of academic articles and the fact that she is the most quoted author in bibliographies of Baroque painting. A time-worn photograph shows the Museum of Fine Arts damaged by the war. It was winter, 1945. Museum staff are clearing snow among the plaster copies and giant statues in the Hall of Roman Antiquities. A young woman with a broomstick is visible among the bustling figures – Klára Garas. That was when she began work at the Collection of Old Masters Paintings. All over the world her colleagues still quote from her articles and at universities her writings are used for the education of new generations of art historians, who study her research methods. Who is Klára Garas? Where did she start from and how did her academic career lead her to head the Museum of Fine Arts? I intended to interview ‘Aunt Klári’, as she is still referred to in the museum, but due to her illness I had to derive the answers to my questions from earlier conversations, archive material and, last but not least, the memories of those who worked with her for decades. Klára Garas was born in Rákosszentmihály on 19 June 1919 into an engineering family receptive to culture. According to her own account, she became attracted to literature and the arts in general at home, but no one in her family was close to the fine arts. It is interesting, therefore, that she decided to become an art historian when she was just 13. In 1937, her final year at grammar school, she came second in a national history competition, so was admitted to read art history at Pázmány Péter University without having to sit an entrance examination. She took her PhD at Tibor Gerevich’s department in 1941. During her study trips she herself took photographs of frescos and altarpieces discovered in dim churches. She carried the stand and flash equipment, since it was rare that she could work with a professional photographer. She also received help from foreign colleagues when writing her Maulbertsch monograph, but she preferred to study archive records, contemporary written sources and journals. “It is a hunt, and it has to be found,” she once described the joyful excitement of research. A museologist is a researcher, a guardian of museum treasures, a curator and an able organiser of exhibitions all in one. When she joined the Museum of Fine Arts the most valuable works of its collection were still abroad. A part survived the war in the cellar of the Cistercian abbey in Szentgotthárd and was returned to Budapest in the summer of 1945. However, works making up the majority of the museum’s treasures were stuck in eighty cases in Germany and were sent back to the Fine Arts Museum in December 1946. Thus after clearing away the debris the first task was to take an inventory, and survey and restore the works of art. That was followed by setting up the permanent exhibitions. As a result, in 1946 and 1947 exhibitions compiled from private collections and the museum’s own returned items were held. She worked in the Old Masters’ Collection, taught at the university, held public lectures and wrote books for the general public. In 1961 Klára Garas became an Academic Doctor following her monograph on Maulbertsch. Her special field of research included 17th and 18th century Hungarian, Central European and Italian Baroque painting, but she was also attracted to researching so-far unexplored areas and thus soon became deeply involved in collection history. She reconstructed the collection of Archduke Leopold William and the 18th-century gallery of Buda Castle. She also extended the boundaries of knowledge concerning the Esterházy collection. For twenty years from 1964 she headed the Museum of Fine Arts in a political environment wavering between toleration and support. It is undoubtedly due to her that the museum was able to remain part of the international professional network even in those hard times. In the countries under Soviet domination masterpiece exhibitions touring from Dresden to Prague, from Leningrad to Sofia and Warsaw constituted cultural exchange, and Budapest also hosted outstanding works from noted collections for a few months. In addition, Klára Garas opened to the West already in the 1970s, the first internationally noted exhibition being held in Bordeaux in 1972.”