Domokos Kuny Museum

The Kuny Domokos Museum has been operating in the Tata Castle building since 1954.

It received its name from the son of the Lotharingian potter Cuny Domokos.

Beginnings

In 1765 Count Miklós Eszterházy founded a Piarist monastery, whose members were engaged in teaching and antiquarian collecting. The creation of the collection was one result of the Piarists' practical education. The founding of the museum is linked to Béla Dornyay, who was also a Piarist student in Tata and later taught the Piarists as a teacher.

First half of the 20th century

The Piarists' collection began to become a true city museum from 1912. The director‑headmaster was Elek Pintér.

As a consequence of the Treaty of Trianon, the Komárom County and City Museum Association ended up outside the border, and thus there was no forum for scientific collecting or interest in the fragmented county area. This lack resulted in the expansion of the role of the Tata city museum, turning it into a regional museum with a collecting scope.

In the 1930s, the institutionalisation of the Tata Museum was thanks to Zoltán Magyary, born in Tata, who was a ministry department head. In 1938 a collection catalogue was published, listing 228 items with short and exact descriptions, and its introductory studies drew attention to the significance of the collection. By 1944 the number of objects had risen to over 600.

The material of the collection relatively neatly survived the Second World War. When the collection was nationalised and later the monastery secularised, the rich assemblage of the Piarist museum and monastery formed the basis of its successor, the Kuny Domokos Museum collection.

Second half of the 20th century

Following the museum law enacted in 1949, museum life in Tata was transformed. Initially the Quadt Villa was the headquarters of the Tata museum.

Between 1951 and 1954 the inventory of collections began, their cataloguing, acquisition of larger collections, systematic collecting work.

In 1954 the material was placed in the Tata Castle, and the museum received its name, after Domokos Kuny, a Budai porcelain manufacturer who lived in the second half of the 18th century and was raised in Tata. In 1954 the first permanent exhibition opened, followed in 1955 by the opening of the porcelain exhibition and the Roman stone collection. At that time paintings from the Tata and Majka Esterházy castles and from the Piarist monastery also entered the museum.

The museum could use the whole building of the castle only from 1959. In 1963 a new permanent exhibition was opened, presenting the history of the town and the surrounding settlements from the Paleolithic to the 19th century.

In 1974 and 1975 the permanent exhibition consisting of 12 rooms opened in the Castle. The exhibition presented the archaeological, historical and artistic collections of the former Tata and Komárom districts from the Bronze Age to the 19th century. Particularly valuable are the Roman material from Brigetio and Almásfüzitő, the medieval stone material from Vértesszentkereszt, and the section presenting the medieval Tata and the history of the castle.

By the 1970s the system of temporary museum exhibitions was established. The Komárom County fine arts exhibitions, and series of exhibitions on hunting history and universal folklore became regular for years.

During the 1970s and 1980s the historical collection was enriched by the purchase of the documentary legacy of Elemér Révhelyi’s photography and the Fellner oeuvre research. The applied arts collection was enriched with the Kuffler legacy in 1986. The fine arts collection was continuously expanded with works by Károly Kernstok, György Zilahy, József Györffy K., László Hegedűs, Jenő Dudás.

From the second half of the 1970s, for a decade the international folklore collection continuously grew. The Tata museum also has a nationally significant paleobotanical collection.

Temporary exhibitions

In the Vár temporary exhibition rooms, alongside individual and group visual and applied arts exhibitions of creators connected to Tata and Komárom-Esztergom county, it hosts historical, folkloric, archaeological, domestic and international contemporary art exhibitions (Dobroszláv Lajos, Martyn Ferenc, Schadl János, Vaszary János, Zilahy György).