Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest is one of the most frequently visited museums in Hungary: hundreds of thousands of people visit its temporary and permanent exhibitions each year.

With more than one hundred thousand pieces, the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts is one of the most impressive in Europe. In 2006, the year of the museum’s centennial, MOL sponsored a series of chamber exhibitions called Geniuses and Masterpieces: the objective was to use a different approach in presenting world famous painters to the public and to discuss a particular theme in an extraordinary way. Visitors viewed masterpieces from Turner through Titian to Picasso in the frame of six consecutive exhibitions never before shown in Hungary. In addition to the so-called Museum + programs each Thursday night, held for the past three years with the support of MOL, our company assisted the organization of an exhibition in 2007 to show the masterpieces by Hundertwasser, a charming eccentric, and we were the highlighted sponsor of Ferdinand Hodler’s unique lifetime exhibition in 2008. Additionally, this year the MOL Corporate Group sponsored an exhibition by the Czech artist Mucha. This year brought another novelty as well: our company is helping to organize other museum pedagogical programs: The Saturday Morning Program, The Family Day Program, and The Zebra Studio, all of which support new talent and help develop young artists.

Museum+ is a special programme every Thursday evening that follows the popular example of leading museums in Western Europe. People who are too busy during working hours as well as weekends but open to the world of culture can visit permanent and temporary Museum of Fine Arts exhibitions since they offer long opening times on Thursdays.
The programmes are organised to blend with the theme of any given temporary exhibition so that the visitor can become better acquainted with it through other genres and branches of the arts. Invited art historians and guides conduct exclusive tours based on pre-defined themes while the Marble Hall becomes stage for young jazz musicians to perform concerts. Other programmes are available where leading representatives of Hungarian artistic life from other branches - music, dance or literature - offer the visitor unique viewpoints closely connected to the temporary exhibition themes.

From Degas to Picasso – French masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow

At the end of January the Museum of Fine Arts opens an exhibit of select works from the unparalleled collection of masterpieces of the Moscow Pushkin Museum.
55 pieces displayed will represent the art of French painting from mid-19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The exhibit encompasses impressionism through the symbolism of the last decade of the 19th century as well as fauve, cubist works of avant-garde. Till the end of April visitors will be able to view masterpieces of Courbet, Corot, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, among others of the period.

The aim of the exhibition is not only to provide a perspective of the evolution and the most significant schools of modern painting but also to pay respect to two prominent art collectors of the mid 19th and early 20th century, Ivan Morozov and Sergey Shchukin. The masterpieces of the Budapest exhibition are from the world renowned collection of two wealthy textile manufacturers of the era. The 55 works chosen from the Pushkin Museum’s collection allows us to see the most dynamic representations in this period in French art. The majority of the works from the eminent representatives of different styles of painting during the mid 19th and early 20th century are well known from art books. Degas’ Little Dancer, Paul Cézanne’s early pieces from the series of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Monet Bridge over a pond, a piece from Gauguin Tahitian period Matamoe, Van Gogh’s unusual choice of subject The Round of the Prisoners and Matisse’ Delphinium, La Danse, or Picasso’s Harlequin are all significant paintings of that period. The exhibit is showcases this exciting era in the history of art divided into 8 segments. Separate segments for Realism, the Barbizon School, Impressionism, Modernism, Cezanne, Symbolism, Fauve painters and the beginning of Avant-garde help to put them into perspective.

Selected works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum have been shown in Budapest in 1978, but the majority of the items are exhibited in Hungary for the first time.

The exhibition’s chief curator is Irina Antonova, the director of the Pushkin Museum, co-curators are Aleksey Petuhov and Anna Pounanskaya. The exhibition’s Hungarian director is Ferenc Tóth art historian.

The exhibition is sponsored by MOL.