Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Exhibition of Medieval Art in Cologne

Last week I had a chance to see the exhibition "Glanz und Grösse des Mittelalters" at the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne (Splendour and Glory of the Middle Ages). The new building of the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum provides a spacious and modern exhibition space right next door to the historic building of the Schnütgen (the former St. Cecilia church) for such exhibitions (this is in fact the first such show). The rich collection of the Schnütgen Museum provides a great overview of medieval art in Cologne and the Rhineland - the aim of the present exhibition was to gather other highlights stemming from Cologne but kept in various collections worldwide. The resulting exhibition and the accompanying catalogue does provide a great overview of medieval sculpture and decorative arts in Cologne, and includes a number of important paintings and illuminated manuscripts as well (although naturally it cannot match the complete overview of medieval painting in Cologne provided on the lower floor of the nearby Wallraf-Richartz Museum).

Over a decade ago, a select number of medieval objects from the Schnütgen toured the US at the exhibition Fragmented Devotion (at the McMullen Museum of Art of Boston College). Now objects from American collections in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles are shown alongside of loans from various European museums. The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest lent two spectacular late Gothic statues of the Virgin Mary and St John, which are now joined with the crucified Christ, once again forming the original group once standing at the abbey church of Grosskönigsdorf. As I was not able to take photos in the exhibition, I am illustrating this with a photo I found on Wikipedia:

Museum Schnütgen - Glanz und Größe des Mittelalters-5138
Crucifixion group from Grosskönigsdorf by Master Tilman, 1480/90

The life-size figures were carved by master Tilman - who has a sizeable oeuvre in the area - around 1480/90. It was interesting to see the group united - the sculptures in Budapest preserved much of their polychromy, while the Christ figure still in Grosskönigsdorf has been stripped of its paint layer. The two saints appeared on the art market after the dissolution of the monastery, and were purchased from a Munich art dealer in 1916. Why and how the central figure remained in its original place, is not known. Here is a link to the object description on the Museum of Fine Arts website.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Hungarian National Gallery in Crisis

Throne room in the former royal palace
- now the home of winged altarpieces in the National Gallery 
Hungary (and its capital, Budapest) has a rich and multi-layered art museum system, the result of almost two centuries of organic development (I wrote about these museums in a previous post). One of the largest such institutions in Budapest is the Hungarian National Gallery, officialy created as a separate museum in 1957, and presently housed inside the former royal palace on top of Buda castle hill. The museums is home to art from all over the territory of historic Hungary, ranging in chronology from the 11th century to the present day. The museum is the largest repository of Hungarian medieval art, holding stone carvings, sculptures, painting and complete altarpieces. You can browse highlights of the collection starting from this page. It is also a very important research center of Hungarian art history - during the last few decades, most new knowledge about Hungarian art was published in the catalogues and journals of the National Gallery, many of which can be studied online in the database of Hungarian museum publications (go down to "Magyar Nemzeti Galéria").

Hans Siebenbürger: St. Eligius before King Clotaire
One of the more recent acquisitions of the Gallery 
Several years ago, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, László Baán raised the possibility of once again uniting the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Museum, into one mega-museum (The Art Newspaper 177, 2007). The idea then was met with skepticism and rejection - but was already put partly in practice in the 2010 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London titled Treasures from Budapest (to mixed reviews, as the detailed overview of Gábor Endrődi at the 1100sor.hu blog proved - in Hungarian, but with links to English-language reviews). Things, however, sped up this year, after a major EU-funded expansion plan of the Museum of Fine Arts was scrapped (On this, see the brief report of The Art Newspaper, as well as the letter to the editor of TAN at the bottom of this page.) Baán then went ahead to realize his plan of merging the two museums under his leadership, and received government support for it. What was only a plan this summer (see once again The Art Newspaper's report) quickly became a reality when the backing of this plan was announced in a government decree, and Baán was appointed as state commissary to lead the project. There was talk of negotiations, examinations and planning - but less the nthree weeks later, another decree was published, announcing that the two museums will have to be officially merged by February 29, 2012.