Hungarian National Gallery English

Collections

20th-Century Art after 1945

The exhibition is introduced by the post-1945 changes, works of art created in the spirit of progressiveness but at the same time linked to pre-war antecedents and testifying to a synthesis of styles that existed side by side and influenced each other (Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). In the corridor area delimited by the two screens, the visitor can see works from the 1950s: genre paintings, depictions of work and workers, and portraits. In accordance with the dictatorship’s arts policy of the day, these are stylistically homogeneous and follow the themes laid down at this time. Returning to the beginning of the row of rooms looking onto the Danube, the visitor can view works by artists who represented possible paths of development in opposition to vulgarising tendencies, artists who pursued their careers autonomously. In the next rooms there are works by a new generation, one which set out in the footsteps of older masters but which at the same time linked in to international artistic life and the various stylistic tendencies found there. Non-figurative trends existing in parallel appear as adaptations of Abstract Expressionism as well as of (Neo-)Geometrical, Structuralist and Organic endeavours. Of the figurative tendencies near to these and at the same time likewise playing an important role, versions of Pop Art and Hyperrealism developed in a particular way are on view in the last room in the row. In the section of corridor that opens from this row of rooms, there are radical Avant-Garde works – primarily built on the use of photographs, these consist largely of action documentations –, and objects. These creations represent endeavours touching upon conceptual questions, endeavours often suffused with politically deprecatory attitudes or addressing ontological or other philosophical issues. In the first room on the west side, there are works that incorporate achievements of the Avant-Garde, but which exhibit connections with more traditional pictorial and formal solutions. Within the figurative tendencies appearing here we encounter examples of personal narrative, just as we do reinterpretations connected with the cultural traditions of individual mythologies or with the archaic culture of artefacts. The next row of rooms shows the spread of the Trans-Avant-Garde. As a result of Postmodernism, a comprehensive change of view took place, one that affected the whole of art. Works indicating the survival of the earlier grotesque-ironic attitudes or the rise of installation art fit in with understandable naturalness to the pluralistic approach, as do the examples connected with Post-Conceptualist tendencies.