Purchases, gifts, bequests

Despite their difficult financial situation, museums continue to expand their collections

MúzeumCafé 43.

In the course of the 20th century difficult economic and/or political times were often actually a golden era for museums. People compelled to give up their works of art at such times have primarily offered their valuable items to public collections, since generally in times of crisis the market doesn’t function smoothly. World wars, economic slump, anti-Jewish laws, the formation from 1949 of the one-party state – in each case in Hungary the route undertaken by artworks changed from the earlier artist to collector, collector to collector, to collector to museum. Generally public collections were favoured since the state was still a greater financier than a frozen (or artificially frozen) art market. In those particular years maintaining a collection represented a significant burden for its owner and thus donating was often a safer or more economical choice than keeping an art collection. Hard times are here again, both for public collections and the art market. In effect there is no money available in the budgets of institutes for expanding a museum collection. If you consider the artworks bought or obtained as bequests in recent years, an imposing list emerges. Is it thanks to the lack of, or crisis of a middle class or the appropriate generosity of state resources that, despite there being ‘in effect’ no money, museums in Hungary are nevertheless expanding? Or is it simply that, as the old saying has it, sooner or later every work of art ends up in a museum? The task of a museum as defined by law is to collect “cultural goods and the elements of intellectual cultural heritage” and this task can be undertaken in many ways. Even if not purchasing and not receiving donations museum collections are expanding – which simply means that certain art objects, such as archaeological finds automatically end up in a museum.