Exhibition Presents Life of Renowned Painter Mihály Munkácsy and His Wife

Mihály Munkácsy and his wife’s real love and their everyday life are being presented in a new temporary exhibition at the Munkácsy Mihály Museum in Békéscsaba (eastern Hungary). The exhibition “Miska and Cécile” opened last week on Wednesday and can be visited until June 1.

Gabriella Gyarmati, the exhibition’s curator, told MTI that the wife, Cécile Papier, is a “victim of art historians, novelists, and diarists.” Many have portrayed her as if she had married the painter out of interest and condemned him to a life of constant work to secure her own luxurious life. The curator had long wished to “put this error right.”

She stressed that

her aim was not to refute the known allegations, but to show the everyday life of these two people and that there was real love between them.

Cécile was a patron of her husband, a good marketer and PR specialist in modern terms, who was a master at shaping the image of her husband in the world, helping him to gain supporters. She also managed the Colpach estate she inherited, which was another important source of income for them. She was a collector as well, without whom the painter’s great talent would have been wasted, the curator added.

Although the museum in Békéscsaba does not have any letters from the couple, several of Munkácsy’s correspondences are known from collections, in which he also writes about his wife. Cécile’s letters are not known, but the replies to them are, which show, among other things, that Munkácsy missed his wife when she was at Colpach, the art historian explained.

She added that the museum’s collection includes an art photograph of the painting In the Studio (Műteremben) which shows his wife sitting on a chair, indicating that Munkácsy had asked his wife for her opinion on his work, treating her as an equal partner.

Cécile’s figure is evoked by reproductions of two portraits by Hans Makart and Wilhelm von Kaulbach and by a number of photographs.

Costume designer Inez Bányai recently created a sculpture of a dress inspired by the clothes in the photographs of Mrs. Munkácsy.

She donated her work to the museum and it has become the centerpiece of the exhibition, “linking the 19th and 20th centuries with the present day,”

the curator said.

Gabriella Gyarmati explained that the exhibition also includes Cécile Papier’s last will and testament, written in 1912, which laid the foundation for the Békéscsaba institution’s collection of 611 works of art,  the largest Munkácsy collection in the world.

In 1917, Cécile von Barnewitz, the wife’s niece, who executed the will, sent a rich collection of material to Hungary, packed in wooden crates. During the First World War, the wooden boxes ended up in the attic of the Ministry of Culture and later in the Hungarian National Museum. Most of the relics, about 400 items, finally arrived in Békéscsaba in 1933.

Via MTI, Featured image: Wikipedia