Ground Floor, Prints and Drawings - 17 October 2024 - 16 March 2025
Biedermeier Portraits and Interiors with Contemporary Reflections
// Open every week from Thursday to Sunday with a permanent exhibition ticket. The exhibition hall of Prints and Drawings is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. //
Displaying seventy or so works, it is the new chapter in the series launched last year and is among the exhibitions that place acquisitions of the recent past in the contexts of the collection and contemporary art. The core of the material are those portraits by Josef Kriehuber (1800–1876) that the museum purchased in the last decade, but visitors can also see works by Franz and Jakob Alt, Miklós Barabás, Markus Schinwald and Dia Zékány.
The Biedermeier works typical documents of the mentality of their periods. Illustrating the democratisation of the portrait, they raise the question of how people generally thought about personality and the relationship between the individual and society in the first half of the nineteenth century. Another genre of the period – that of the interior or room portrait – was also suitable for showing personality and social status. A separate section in the exhibition is occupied by small portraits made with the picture-within-the-picture method; before now, these miniature portraits had only been exhibited to the public once in the past one hundred years. Their current presentation is a tribute to their passionate collector and generous donator, Olga Perlep Procopius.
The Biedermeier is a long-gone mode of expression, yet its subjects have lost nothing of their topicality. The contemporary artists introduced at our exhibition – Markus Schinwald and Dia Zékány – exemplify how old pieces served as inspiration for their work and how a once-popular genre is suitable for expressing contemporary ideas in a contemporary language. The dialogue between the exhibited classical and contemporary pieces thus creates a context of interpretation that lends freshness to lessons of the past and timelessness to questions of the present.
In the decades of the Biedermeier, middle-class homes were decorated by family portraits in unprecedented abundance. This was the time when, albeit only briefly, people believed that the peace of the home was not a mere illusion. However, this Central European idyll removed from tension, social injustice, oppressors and the oppressed was abruptly shattered by the events of 1848–1849. Thanks to the economic upswing the decades between the agreement concluding the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the “spring of the nations” (1848), the middle-class homes of the Reform Era represented the improving social standing of their owners. While voicing their political views with caution, the middle and lower-middle class sought to emulate the upper classes through their lifestyle. Copying princely portrait galleries, they aspired to display the prominents of their families, with the family idyll not only being represented by the head of the family but all its members. The genre of the interior is also a Biedermeier invention, and, similarly to the portraits of the time, had the function of displaying the collective values of the family.
Biedermeier portraits – with homes exuding affluence, youths with perfect smiles, girls with gentle faces, and elderly men and women with their countenance beaming with wisdom – were attempts at beautifying reality. They are mirrors of desires, allowing us a glimpse of the dreams and dreamers of an era. Approaching the exhibited works in this vein reveals them as faithful imprints of a period.
From 29 October, the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts runs simultaneously with Biedermeier Lifestyles. Art and the Rise of the Middle Classes in 19th-century Hungary (1815–1867) at the Hungarian National Gallery.
The curator of the exhibition is art historian Kata Bodor.
Main sponsor and cooperating partners of the exhibition:
