The permanent exhibition of modern art in the central halls on the museum’s second floor presents the most important artists and trends of the period spanning from the fin de siècle to the end of World War II. In this exhibition unit, devoted to Hungarian art between 1896 and 1945, visitors can view nearly 150 paintings, 30 sculptures, and 200 medals.
From March 2024, the unit of the permanent exhibition of twentieth-century Hungarian art will be on display with renewed content and appearance, focusing on the prominent artists and artistic groups of the period from 1890 to 1930. The rearranged exhibition introduces slightly different stylistic emphases, as well as new perspectives in its thematic units and oeuvre preferences.
In the reconstructed halls, the leading intellectual trends and stylistic aspirations of the period are grouped in seven thematic sections: Hungarian art nouveau; Lajos Gulácsy’s art; decorations of the Schiffer Villa; post-impressionism in Hungary; the group of artists called The Eight; activists and émigré artists; and Hungarians associated with the Bauhaus in Weimar.
Outstanding among the works of symbolism and art nouveau are Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka and Lajos Gulácsy’s oeuvres. Besides the Hungarian Fauvists, known as The Eight (including Béla Czóbel, Dezső Czigány, Bertalan Pór and Károly Kernstok), and the avant-garde artists (József Nemes Lampérth, Béla Uitz, Sándor Bortnyik and Lajos Tihanyi), the exhibition features masterpieces by Hungarians associated with the Bauhaus in Weimar, the members of the Nagybánya artists’ colony, especially Károly Ferenczy, as well as József Rippl-Rónai, the members of KUT, i.e., the New Association of Fine Artists (Róbert Berény and Ödön Márffy) and the artists of the Gresham Circle (István Szőnyi, Aurél Bernáth, József Egry and Pál Pátzay).
The paintings, sculptures and medals are displayed together with masterpieces from the turn of the century and the Bauhaus, loaned for our exhibition by the Museum of Applied Arts, primarily from periods hallmarked by the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), when artists tried their talent in a variety of media: they made paintings but also designed ceramics, furniture, and tapestry. The original interiors are evoked by archival photographs and display furniture with carved folk-tale motives by architect Ede Toroczkai Wigand, a master of the Gödöllő artists’ colony; the richly adorned art nouveau ceramics designed by József Rippl-Rónai and manufactured in the Zsolnay Factory for the dining room of Count Tivadar Andrássy; and Marcell Breuer’s world-renowned tube steel furniture. In the hall titled Artistic Harmony inside a Bourgeois Home – The Schiffer Villa, visitors can marvel at the decoration of the former home of Miksa Schiffer, a successful contractor and patron of the arts, completed in 1911. Its design, made by notable architect József Vágó, reflects the period’s modernist aspirations. The villa was severely damaged in World War II but is brought to life in our exhibition by József Rippl-Rónai and István Csók’s panel paintings, Károly Kernstok’s design for a stained glass window and Vilmos Fémes Beck’s fountain figures.
Curators of the exhibition:
Gergely Mariann
Edit Plesznivy
Judit Szeifert, Dorottya Gulyás (sculpture)
Gábor Tokai (medals)
András Zwickl
Assistant curators:
Ágnes Horváth
Rita Rödönyi
Réka Balogh, Zoltán Suba (sculpture)
An emblematic masterpiece of the Hungarian Art Nouevau, the Golden Age had its public debut in 1898 at the Műcsarnok, where it won the grand prix of the Hungarian Fine Arts Society. It was later awarded the bronze medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition. The picture’s style is akin to the symbolism of Jugendstil melded with naturalism; its special atmosphere and refined sensuality are created by the duality between forms linked to the academic tradition and the use of decorativity that provides their counterpoint.
Bortnyik’s composition with six figures conveys the Cubo-futuristic zeitgeist of dynamic movement and energetic struggle. The mutually confronting, rhythmically repeated rectangular forms and belligerent figures abstracted into machine-men exude the aggression that characterises destruction and the denial of the past. The solid texture of the oil paint thickly applied on the canvas base serves the purpose of the artistic representation of the material presence of physical power.
During the more than ten years József Rippl-Rónai lived in France as a painter, he became familiar with the synthetic and decorative idiom that followed Impressionism. The artist returned home to Hungary in the early 1900s and settled in Kaposvár. The interior paintings he made there allow an insight into the loving atmosphere of small town life. In regard to its theme, this picture of his father and an old relative, referred to as Uncle Piacsek, is akin to the artist’s interior pictures.
