The Ludwig Museum Permanent Collection in Focus

Forming the core of the collection are the seventy works which the Ludwigs donated in 1989, and the further ninety-five pieces they put on deposit two years later. By this act of immeasurable value and significance, they brought to the Hungarian public artistic achievements of the second half of the twentieth century which had hitherto only been seen in reproduction, filling a void that existed in the education of art history and fine arts.

The imaginary line starts with two major Picasso paintings, whose special qualities acquired special attention through the expressive painting of the nineteen eighties. The Ludwigs, who started building what became Europe’s largest pop-art collection in the nineteen sixties, brought to Budapest emblematic works by American and British artists (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg etc.), and some outstanding pieces of photo-realism (Close, Morley). Juxtaposed with these are some important pieces of progressive Hungarian painting from the nineteen sixties (Keserü, Bak, Nádler). One or two distinctive works also give a glimpse into European trends (Tinguely, Appel, Hantai). Art with social and political themes starts off with paintings by Vostell and Richter and continues with pre-transition Eastern European works (Gulyás, Pinczehelyi, Lejderman, Nazarenko etc.).

The exhibition spans the movements of the seventies and eighties: conceptual art, Fluxus, performance and body art (Rainer, Beuys, Erdély, Lakner, Maurer, Hajas and others) and the new painting of the nineteen eighties (A. R. Penck, Baselitz, Birkás, Fehér, Kelemen, Bak and others). Starting on February 7^th of next year and running until the end of March, 2008, film and video works from the collection will be shown, under the title “Total Cinema”.