Museum of Fine Arts to show Chinese terracotta army, Blake, Master MS

The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest will present this year exhibitions featuring the Chinese Terracotta Army, the work of William Blake, and the mysterious Master MS and his era, while the Hungarian National Gallery will show Secession posters.

Director of the Museum and Fine Arts and its member institutions, László Baan, told the press on Tuesday that starting this Friday and running through June 1, a collection of highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts’s graphics collection will go on display at the world-famous Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao. Featured artists include such classics as Durer, Leonardo, Raffaello, Rubens, Rembrandt and Goya, as well as Hungarian masters Barabás, Aba-Novák and Vasarely, he added.

Baan said that the museum’s collection has grown considerably in recent years thanks to successful exhibitions, record-breaking visitor numbers, and the strengthening of the institution’s prestige.

He said that nearly a thousand works of art had been acquired through purchases and donations, representing a total value of over 5 billion forints (EUR 12.4m). Among the new acquisitions he cited an El Greco painting, artworks representing a total value of one million euros received from Georg Baselitz, as well as pieces by Kandinsky and Girodet, an Egyptian mask, an antique vase and Japanese woodcarvings.