Monday, September 06, 2010

D'or et de feu


A new exhibition is coming to the Musée de Cluny (officially Musée national du Moyen Age) in Paris, titled "D'or et de feu" (Out of Gold and Fire - Art in Slovakia at the end of the Middle Ages), and opening on September 16th. The exhibition aims to survey the Late Gothic heritage of Slovakia, an area which formed the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Organized in cooperation with the Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava), the exhibition will showcase paintings, sculpture, goldsmith works from several collections in Slovakia. As apparent from the (sub)title and the press release (pdf), the exhibition will focus mainly on the 15th century, thus the periods of King Sigismund and King Matthias, as well as the Jagiellonian rulers Vladislas II and Louis II (contrary to the press release, Hungary was of course not "part of the powerful Habsburg Empire" at that time).


A catalogue for the exhibition is in preparation. The curator representing the Slovak National Gallery is Dusan Buran, who organized the 2003 exhibition on Gothic in Slovakia and edited its catalogue. He is responsible for the permanent collection of this part of the Gallery.

More information on the exhibition will be posted here as it becomes available. You can follow the preparations on Twitter, courtesy of Musée de Cluny.

3 comments:

  1. Well, I see once more one hungarian nationalist. Contemporary Slovakia formend then the northern part of Hungary, but we have to say, that it was since Svatopluk´s times (10th Century)the territory occupied by less developped Hungarian people. The northern part was the territory of Slovaks and it was most developped part of Hungary. Hungarians (Magyars) lived in southern part as an agriculture a wild people. Bye, bye, my friend.

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  2. Gotta love anonymous comments. What does Svatopluk has to do with late Gothic art in the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary?

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    1. Late Gothic Art of Slovakia has a very little common with the state called Kingdom of Hungary (Uhorsko).

      In fact, the Gothic art of Slovakia was art of the free towns, local landlords, villages, (regions) and cloisters; it was not the art of dynastic courts. The state was not frame of the art; art and artistic connections exceeded the borders of the state. Finally, a lot of art and artists including Paul of Levoča/Leutschau was of local domestic origin. Your sight on the character of the art of Slovakia may be biased by the great dynastic exhibitions dedicated to eras of kings of Hungary; events are dated from the 1980s (Schallaburg 1982, Sigismundus 1987), until contemporary period (Sigismundus, 2006).

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