Museum of Fine Arts Presents Mihály Munkácsy’s Oeuvre with 100 Works

Oil sketch of Mihály Munkácsy’s painting Conquest at an exhibition in Békéscsaba

The temporary exhibition “Munkácsy – Story of a Worldwide Sensation” that opens on November 27 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, presents the oeuvre of the Hungarian painter with more than a hundred works of art, archival photographs, documents and cultural artefacts.

The jubilee exhibition, organized on the occasion of the 180th anniversary of Mihály Munkácsy’s birth and the 125th anniversary of his death, will present the main works of the painter, as well as his lesser-known, rarely or never before seen in Hungary, the organizers said at the press launch on Monday.

László Baán, Director General of the Museum of Fine Arts, stressed at the event that

the exhibition of around 100 works is the most comprehensive Munkácsy exhibition to date, and for the first time includes some international parallels, as many of the works had never been to Hungary before.

“Mihály Munkácsy is undoubtedly the best-known artist of 19th century Hungarian art. His turbulent life has been chronicled in numerous novels, and the legend surrounding him, the Munkácsy myth, has been an integral part of Hungarian culture for over a hundred years. Yet we have sought to present something new about him,” emphasized the exhibition’s curator, Réka Krasznai, art historian and chief museologist at the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery.

The exhibition is divided into six major thematic units:

• The birth of a legend – the first successes: The section presents the evolution of Munkácsy’s art from Yawning Apprentice, through Munkácsy’s main realist works, to the epoch-changing painting In the Studio.
• The end of the century in Paris – the road to the European elite: The exhibition includes Milton, a landmark in Munkácsy’s success story in Paris, that won the Grand Prix d’Honneur at the 1878 Paris World Exhibition, and Peacocks, that is making its debut in Hungary.
• Painter of colossal pictures – the world-famous Munkácsy: At the center of this unit are the master’s giant paintings, including the Christ Trilogy, the work entitled Conquest and the ceiling painting in the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts. Réka Krasznai pointed out that it was thanks to the Christ Trilogy, which were exhibited throughout Europe and the United States in the 1880s and attracted more than two million visitors, that Munkácsy became a world-famous painter.
• Freedom of creation: This unit presents the genre in which he created the most freely, the major works of 19th-century Hungarian landscape painting.
• Fashionable, expensive, picturesque – salon paintings and the Munkácsy brand: The section gives a glimpse into the world of the Paris salons of the late 19th century, the most popular type of painting in the oeuvre to this day, the so-called salon paintings.
• The cult of Munkácsy: The unit provides an insight into the history of the cult that surrounded Munkácsy’s oeuvre and the painter himself during his lifetime.

The exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts until March 30, 2025.

Via MTI, Featured image: MTI/Máthé Zoltán