The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art In Budapest, Hungary ~ A Modern Palace Of Fabulous Art

Written by Judith Katzen Monday, 30 January 2012 22:40

The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, Hungary, was the first Ludwig Museum to be established in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1989 the art-collecting couple, Irene and Peter Ludwig, made a contract with the Hungarian state and established this contemporary fine-art museum with 72 works of their own pieces of art. In 1991 they added a further 195 pieces, expanding the collection which can be seen at the Palace of Arts, and which is continually being added to. The Palace of the Arts opened in 2005 and it accommodates the most diverse branches of the arts, with facilities incorporating the most advanced theater, museum, and acoustic technologies. The spectacular building occupies an area of more than 10,000 m2 at the Pest side of the Lágymányosi Bridge, adjacent to the National Theatre, the first pillar of the Millennium City Centre being built on the site. The main objective of the architects – Zoboki, Demeter and Associates – was that the multi-functional building should present a coherent whole when viewed from the outside. The exterior presents a simple, clear aspect with large expanses of glass, and almost devoid of decorative elements. Inside, the building is laid out into broad, clearly-arranged internal spaces. The outer surfaces are of “dead” material – concrete, glass and Süttő limestone, while inside, an enormous undulating main wall, clad mainly in walnut, creates a warm, friendly atmosphere. The building’s principal visual feature is the imposing lobby, which connects the three main sections: the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, the Festival Theatre, and the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art. Its design and size are optimal for a lovely and educational trip through contemporary international and Eastern European art. The Béla Bartók National Concert Hall is the largest section of the building. With an audience capacity of 1700, the concert hall ranks among the best of the world in terms of acoustics, having been built by Artec of New York in association with Hungarian engineers. The fabulous acoustic system is coupled with a high-tech audio-visual system which can serve the needs of any visiting production at world standard. The queen of musical instruments, the great organ, was installed in spring 2006. The concert hall is home to the National Philharmonic and its Orchestra, Choir, and Music Library. The Festival Theatre occupies the east wing of the complex. It seats an audience of 452, and its stage technology is of equal standard to that of the concert hall. The theatre hosts visiting companies and is home to the National Dance Theatre. The Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, formerly accommodated in Buda Castle, takes up the whole side of the building facing the Danube. In addition to the exhibition halls, the Museum wing incorporates the Glass Hall, the events hall of the Palace of the Arts, and an expandable lecture and projection hall. The Museum has a gross floor area of 12,000 m2. The flooring in the exhibition halls is bamboo, and illumination of art works is largely by natural light, supplemented by a system of concealed light sources. In line with international standards, the humidity is constantly monitored and controlled, and adjusted to suit each exhibition’s particular needs. Visit the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art website: http:www.ludwigmuseum.hu

Its continuously growing collection gives an overview of international art since 1950 and of Hungarian art from the 1960’s to recent days. It displays masterworks of modern and contemporary art in its permanent collection, focused on American pop art (Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) and on Eastern and Central European art. The museum’s collection also has a valuable classic and contemporary avant-garde Russian collection. The Ludwig collection of some 800 works by Picasso is one of the largest collection in the world and from this collection three significant paintings from his late period are in Budapest. Budapest is the ideal place to reflect on the role of art and politics, and the Ludwig Museum, in its permanent collection exhibition, showcases the intersection of contemporary art and politics. The collection reflects on the social and political utopias, mines cultural memory and explores the limits of creativity in public spaces, and above all, the complex role that the artist plays in society. These reflections are especially fraught with complex questions in the former eastern bloc, as any history of art will be wrapped up with questions of censorship, propaganda and authorship. The different conceptual bases for art due to the repressive political climate mean that certain “apolitical” forms, such as abstract art, took on a political cast during the Cold War. In this case, abstraction became a negation of the systematic ideals of Eastern Europe and a form of rebellious expression. The exhibition rescues many works which had been obscured by political pressures to shed new light on them for both localand international visitors. This wonderful permanentexhibition collected artwork from about fifty artists both from Hungary and various corners of the Eastern and Western European world.

In its most recent and current exhibitions, the thematic approach is the strongest principle defining the selection of works from the Museum’s collection. Instead of displaying the well-known highlights, the exhibition intends to focus on newer works, and endeavours to acquaint the wider public with them. Among them are recent acquisitions on display for the first time in the context of the Museum, in part from Hungarian artists (including István Csákány, Tamás Kaszás, Ádám Kokesch, Csaba Nemes). Some of the works are well-known pieces from the international scene (e.g., the works of Harun Farocki, Zbigniew Libera, Simon Starling, Mladen Stilinović, Bálint Szombathy, Goran Trbuljak). The works are not arranged according to an art historical categorisation or a chronological principle, but in a way which enables us to highlight some other (thematic or formal) aspect of the works. Some of these connections might seem banal or trivial at times, but they rather serve to provide the visitors with starting points for the formations of new meanings (Ferenc Ficzek, Zsigmond Károlyi, Stanislav Kolíbal, Timm Ulrichs, etc.). The exhibitions aim to “rescue” these works form a traditional and rigid art historical system that is often capable of showing only a fraction of the connections and correspondences of the works. For this reason, the exhibition strongly relies on the visitors’ active participation, invited to mobilize and make use of their own experience and knowledge in the reception and interpretation of the works, thus enabled to enter into a more personalized relationship with them. Following on the Ludwig Museum’s exhibition, New Acquisitions – Rarely Seen Works (2009), Kind of Change, immediate upcoming exhibitions will focus on the display of recently acquired works of art. These exhibitions can be considered a complete whole together with the rearranged permanent exhibition, Unmistakable Sentences (2010), where many of the newly acquired works have been on view. The majority of the works of art that have been acquired by the museum during the last couple of years are embedded in the texture of the recent past of East-Central Europe and that of its ever-changing present, where questions of artistic forms and existence, and of historically determined artistic products have been constantly and painfully raised. Some these upcoming exhibitions are: Sing! - Mladen Stilinović Retrospective (April 22, 2011 - July 03, 2011), a retrospective exhibition that brings together the main installations, collages, photographs and art books of the most important neo-avant-garde artists in the former Yugoslavia; László Moholy-Nagy - The Art of Light (June 10, 2011 - September 25, 2011). In this exhibition, the exceptionally diverse artistic and media-theoretical activity of László Moholy-Nagy, key figure of modernist art, is arranged around the motif of light. The selection includes 200 paintings, black and white and colour photographs and graphic drafts from the period after 1922, concurrent with his development of the genre of photogram and his influential pedagogical and art theoretical activity at the Bauhaus; and Rita Ackermann (November 18, 2011 - February 05, 2012), in this exhibition, the atmosphere of the late 1980s and the 1990s means a crucial factor in the development of the art of Rita Ackermann, who started her studies as a painter in Hungary before leaving for New York where she lives and works today. After several prominent galleries and group exhibitions worldwide her works will be on display as a part of the Ludwig Museum’s solo exhibition series.