Renovated Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest to Open

Image: Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

After more than three years of renovation, the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest will open on 31 October. Thanks to the largest-scale and most comprehensive reconstruction project in the museum’s history, the museum building has been renewed, and, returning to the collection’s first concept, the museum’s permanent exhibitions have also been rearranged. Besides the new permanent exhibitions, the revamped museum will welcome visitors with a chamber exhibition titled Leonardo & the Budapest Horse and Rider.

The renewed museum is open to visitors from the noon of its opening day.

The museum reconstruction, implemented within the framework of the Liget Budapest Project, included the restoration of the Romanesque Hall, which sustained severe damage in World War II and since then had been only partially renovated and used as a storage area, along with the modernisation of the building’s obsolete heating system, the installation of air conditioning in some of the exhibition halls, the renewal of a large part of the roof structure, as well as the addition of new exhibition spaces, visitor areas and modern storage facilities.

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

The renewed museum and the new exhibitions will be opened in two stages: the spaces at the basement level and a large part of the renovated Romanesque wing, along with the exhibitions mounted there, will be made available to the public in October, while all the new permanent exhibitions can be visited from the middle of 2019.

In tandem with the rearrangement of the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibitions, some of the permanent exhibitions of the Hungarian National Gallery’s collection of old Hungarian masters will be closed down due to the overall change introduced in the museum’s exhibition concept as a result of returning to the original principles adopted by the founders: after decades of absence, Hungarian art will return home to the Museum of Fine Arts again, thus the history of universal and Hungarian art until the end of the 18^th century will be exhibited together with the treasures of Egyptian and Classical Antiquity.

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Simultaneously with this, the Museum of Fine Arts’ collection of art after 1800 will temporarily – until the opening of the New National Gallery – be moved to the Hungarian National Gallery in the Buda Castle district, where visitors can view Hungarian and international masterpieces spanning more than the last two centuries together from the beginning of 2019. The New National Gallery, constructed within the Liget Budapest Project, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2021.

The Museum of Fine Arts’ complex reconstruction affected 14,000 square metres, which constitutes some 40 percent of its floor space. Besides the Romanesque Hall, the reconstruction extended to the Renaissance Michelangelo Hall, which was closed off to visitors, converted and used for offices in recent decades. Thanks to the renovation, almost 2,000 square metres of exhibition space will regain its original function, the storage space for artworks will be expanded by 500 or so square metres, while a new, modern restaurant and café will also open at the basement level.

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

The Museum of Fine Arts building, opened in 1906, underwent several partial reconstructions during its history but the renovation and comprehensive civil engineering development of the western, Romanesque wing has been necessary for decades.

Standing at the focus of the reconstruction, the museum’s richly ornamented Romanesque Hall, designed after a Romanesque church interior, has been closed to the general public for more than 70 years. Up until the renovation, this space served as a storage area, where some of the paintings of the Old Masters’ Gallery as well as the museum’s collection of plaster replicas of famous sculptures were also preserved. The Liget Budapest Project will end the decades of ill fate that befell the plaster casts: they will be exhibited in the currently renovated Star Fortress in Komárom, to open next year, and in the show storage room of the National Museum Restoration and Storage Centre, being built in Szabolcs Street, Budapest.

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

After long decades, the building of the Museum of Fine Arts has finally undergone an almost complete technical modernisation: among other things, the steam heating system and boilers from the seventies have been replaced along with the old and noisy air conditioning units, while solar panels and collectors have been installed on the roof to ensure a more energy-efficient operation. The subsequent insulation of the building against groundwater has also been carried out. Simultaneously, new electric networks and air-conditioning systems have been built; the security, property protection and IT systems have been modernised; new passenger and freight lifts have been installed and ‘expedition corridors’ satisfying the requirements of modern artefact transportation have been constructed. The museum has also been made completely accessible. During the reconstruction works some 11,000 cubic metres of earth was moved, while 2,700 cubic metres of concrete, 300 tons of reinforcement steel, 900 square metres of walling, 7,100 square metres of plastering, 3,000 square metres of steel structures, 1,800 square metres of glass roof, 1,100 square meters of glass walls, 300,000 running metres of high- and low-voltage cabling as well as 16,000 running metres of machine wiring were used. In addition, 19,000 square metres were clad and 38,000 square metres were painted.      

Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

By the end of this year, the National Museum Restoration and Storage Centre complex in Szabolcs Street will be completed, providing the highest standard conditions and technical background for the conservation and research linked to the more than 300,000 artefacts and artworks of the Museum of Ethnography, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery. The complex will also house the Central European Research Institute for Art History, which will support the scientific work carried out in the Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery.