A Collection Within the Collection: National Gallery

“A collection within the collection” is an interesting exhibition about prints, posters and drawings in the Hungarian National Gallery. More information can be found below if you read the press release.

A Collection Within the Collection
National Gallery
June 15, 2010 – February 13, 2011

Budapest museums

Press release:
As for the number of items contained, the department of drawings and prints holds the largest collection in the Hungarian National Gallery. However, the significance of prints and drawings is less well known, as paper-based objects are very sensitive and cannot be included in the permanent exhibition. The array of cabinets with prints and drawings has, for five consecutive years now, represented an effort to change this, showing a constantly renewed selection to accompany the permanent exhibition of twentieth-century paintings and statues. Collections of posters in Budapest museums, including the Hungarian National Gallery, have recently started to come to the forefront. Being on the borderline between drawing and printing and held partly in the collection of drawings and partly in that of posters, poster and book designs continue to remain hidden treasures, a hidden ‘collection within the collection’, as it were. In 2010, two of our exhibitions will feature graphic design: illustrations will be on display at the show of Félicien Rops’ art to be opened in September, while an exhibition of modern Hungarian commercial posters dating from the inter-war period, currently housed in the National Széchényi Library, will be opened in October. The program of the year 2010 has provided the stimulus for us to compile the content of the graphic cabinets including graphic design (i.e. book and commercial design) works from the collection of drawings and prints in the Hungarian National Gallery.