The Paper Side of Art

The different collections at the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest preserve combined holdings of tens of thousands of drawings and almost two hundred thousand prints, dating from ca. 1300 to the present day. Only a fraction of this vast and unique collection of high-quality artworks is known to the public, or indeed to the art profession, because works on paper are too delicate and fragile to be featured in permanent exhibitions. They can only be shown from time to time at temporary exhibitions or presented in publications, offering selections that are chosen according to a variety of criteria. Prints and drawings are genres with particular properties, and their characteristics and potentials have occupied artists and art thinkers in almost every period in art history. This jubilee album is intended to carry on this tradition, dealing with the topic from a twenty-first-century perspective. This particular anniversary commemorates 150 years since the Esterházy collection, which forms the core of the Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, was purchased by the Hungarian state in 1871.