Storage Break! 1

Storage Break 1.

“My thoughts, my feelings,
They’re taking flight”

A Selection From the 19th-Century Collections of BHM Kiscell Museum-Municipal Gallery

10 September 2022 – 29 January 2023.

Curator: Eszter Molnárné Aczél

Henriette Barabás (1842-1892)

Fruit still life, 1855

oil on canvas

Júlia Szendrey committed the words in the title to paper in March 1856 as the opening lines of a poem of nine verses. Despite its author’s fame, the poem was first published, along with several others, more than 160 years later, in 2018. Up until then research on her life and authorship has been focussed, not on her work, but on legend, on recollections and opinion.

It has only been recently that her output came to be studied and valued for what it was. Perhaps this poem conveys the angst of an author who is stepping in front of her audience for the first time and whose works met mostly with confusion at the time.

Henriette Barabás (1842-1892)

Bust of a Young Girl, 1859

watercolour and pencil on board

The “long 19th century” saw a ferment in both politics and economics, the results of which we take for granted today. Hungary’s first scientific and cultural institutions, such as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian National Museum, were founded in the first half
of the 19th century—institutions that are important to this day. The late 18th century marked the rise of the press, a new means of shaping public opinion. In the space of a century, the numbers of the reading and museum-going public increased significantly, and more and more people had access to education.

The idea of, and wish for, a national academy of fine arts was formulated as early as the start of the century, but it was not until much later that Hungarian artists who were looking for more than the training offered by drawing schools or private tutelage did not have to travel abroad, to Venice or Vienna, or, later, to Munich or Paris. This is why the Pest painting school, the First Hungarian Academy of Painting, of Jakab Marastoni (Giacomo Marastoni, 1804–1860), an Italian-born and academically trained master, was of such great importance. Operating between 1846 and 1860, the Marastoni Academy was modelled after, both in its interiors and teaching methods, the Accademia in Venice. Training was based, in line with academic principles and practices, on the copying of plaster casts and prints of classical sculptures and famous paintings.

This was also the age of the professionalisation of art: gradually, organisational platforms, professional forums, and educational institutions were established, which were a prerequisite for art to become a socially legitimate, autonomous intellectual endeavour—although one not equally available to women and men. Women were able to study drawing and painting both at Marastoni’s academy and in private studios; in fact, the Hungarian Royal Drawing School and Art Teachers’ College, the first, and for a long time only, state-funded artistic academy in Hungary, accepted female students ever since its doors opened in 1871. However, up until the first decades of the 20th century, its programmes and curriculum set dilettantism or amateurism, or, at best, teaching, as the aim of female art, and women’s education in general, none of which should become “activities endangering family life.”

Ilona Barabás (1844-1929)

Portrait of Flóra Felekyné Munkácsy (1836–1906), c. 1860

oil on canvas

“József Rippl-Rónai to Dóra Maurer. A Selection From the Modern Collection of Municipal Gallery” is an exhibition, a panorama of a century, that opened in the spring of 2022 and can be seen until January 2023 at Vaszary Gallery in Balatonfüred. The idea for “Storage Break,” an exhibition series in the Budapest museum, came along during the research for that show. “Storage Break” continues to explore the collection and picks up where the Balatonfüred exhibition left off—reflecting on the potential roles and social standing of female artists.

We want to showcase pieces in the Municipal Gallery collections that have never before been seen by the public and were created by female artists whose lives and careers have hitherto been largely forgotten. Although it had been widespread, since the mid-19th century, for female artists to show their work in the exhibitions of the newly-formed Pest Art Society, an organisation dedicated to the advancement of art in Hungary, as well as at other group shows, it was still common currency at the turn of the century among art pundits that women lacked artistic merit and were to be seen as dilettanti.

Claudina Gerdenich (1876-1909)

Chestnut Vendor,c. 1900

pencil and watercolour on watercolour paper