Modern French Paintings in Budapest

For another two months the Museum of Fine Arts (Szépművészeti Múzeum) will host a great exhibition of Impressionist and Abstract works that has opened in January and will end at the end of April. Called From Degas to Picasso, the event presents 55 works of art borrowed from the extraordinarily rich, internationally acclaimed collection of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The show tries to present an accurate picture of the development and most important trends in modern French painting but also to pay tribute to two outstanding Russian collectors active at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. About 60 years of achievements in painting will be on display, showing a brief summary of the history of arts in that fruitful period, based on the collection of two prominent Russian collectors: Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin.
The Tsarist-era collections were confiscated during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and nationalized the following year, eventually being split between the Pushkin Museum and the State Hermitage Museums. Morozov used the profits from his successful textile business to gather one of the finest private collections of Impressionist and Modernist works. Shchukin, who was heir to a prosperous merchant family, was the more flamboyant of the two, opening his house and collection to young artists and members of the public on Sundays.

The Budapest exhibition provides a chronological overview of the most dynamic period in French art, presenting trends spanning six decades, from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth: prominent works of Impressionism and Symbolism, as well as the first avant-garde movements bearing the stamp of the Fauves and the Cubists. It includes selected masterpieces of some of the best known French painters of the period, including Gauguin, Manet, Picasso, Degas, Courbet, Cézanne, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Monet.