From Degas to Picasso

Museum of Fine Arts

Address: XIV. district, Hősök tere
Phone: 469-7100
Open: Tue-Sun: 10 am - 6 pm
Web: www.szepmuveszeti.hu
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French masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow - The fifty-five pictures on display in this show are picked from the stunning collection housed in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. It is the chance to see paintings by Symbolists from the final decades of the 19th century, important works by the initial avant-garde movement hallmarked by the Fauves and Cubists (including Courbet, Corot, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso), a chronological overview of the most dynamic period in French art.

However, the exhibition is not merely aimed at providing the viewer with some kind of guidebook to the coalescence of modern painting and its primary trends; it is also a way of honouring two great Russian art collectors from the turn of the century, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Scsukin, since the masterpieces on display derive from the extraordinarily rich collections of these two Muscovite textile magnates. Today, had history not interfered, these Russian art experts would perhaps figure alongside great American collectors such as Paul Mellon and Solomon Guggenheim. After the October Revolution the paintings were first moved to the State Museum of Modern Western Art at the end of the 1920s, and then packed away – on the orders of Stalin – in the storerooms of the Pushkin Museum and Hermitage after World War II. They were only put back on public display in the 1960s.
An exhibition of works from the Pushkin Museum was brought to Budapest in 1978, although the majority of the art being shown now is making its first appearance in Hungary.