On one side of the divided space
Shifts, the new permanent exhibition of the Hungarian National Gallery
MúzeumCafé 39.
Shifts was preceded by Contemporary Collection. Its curator, István Dévényi, precisely perceived the limits of making seen and being able to see. If an institution is founded in 1957, if a collection is initiated after 1974 and is organised in an independent department only in 1983, it not only affects the nature of the catalogued works but, within that, their quality. Although later the torment produced by pressure became more refined, the curator had to realize that if he wanted to display powerful works from the end of the 1940s he could rely more on the realists favoured by the gallery’s first director, Gábor Ö. Pogány, rather than the artists of the sidelined European School. Showing the 1960s he could rely on artists representing Hungarian Modernism, rather than those who, having left Hungary, were banned. That was how things happened then. In short, the museum’s own endowments, the real achievement of Hungarian art and the curator’s voluntaristic fantasy were in conflict with one another, thus the end result is pining for the increasingly drooping attention of the visitor, in a voice conceived in discord, along the long line of rooms on the National Gallery’s third floor. The fundamental distortions of the selection can be first observed with the works of the ‘thaw’. The disappointment is not primarily about how many important artists and how many valuable works are not displayed at the restaged exhibition, but about the fact that individual achievement of career path have become an unappreciated phenomenon, as much as did independence without Party membership in the real world or a longing for freedom with the aim of evading personal networks. The ‘exhibitional value’ of Shifts guided by history has unfortunately failed.