Kiscell Museum

The BTM Kiscelli Museum – City Art Gallery, short name Kiscelli Museum, is a cultural institution founded and maintained by the capital city in the III district of Budapest. In the museum building, two organizationally and collection-wise separate but side‑by‑side operating and exhibiting sub‑institutions of the Budapest History Museum have been placed.

The collection of the Modern City History Department covers documents related to the city's history after 1686 and various material relics.

The City Art Gallery is Budapest's fine arts collection, primarily collecting and presenting works of 20th‑century and contemporary artists from the capital.

History

The baroque‑style building complex standing on the Kiscelli hill above Bécsi Road in Óbuda was built between 1745 and 1758 according to the plans of the Viennese architect Johann Entzenhoffer and originally served as the Trinitarian monastery. A church was attached to the north wing of the one‑storey convent; at that time the famous Austrian pilgrimage site’s replica of the Mariazell shrine was placed there, and Kiscell (German: Klein Zell) itself also became a known pilgrimage site.

After the dissolution of the monastic orders in 1784, the building complex passed into the ownership of the chamber, serving as a military hospital, barracks, and warehouse; then the neglected property was purchased in 1911 by Miksa Schmidt, a Viennese furniture manufacturer and art collector, who restored it, used part of it as an exhibition hall, its auxiliary buildings as workshops, and finally, in his 1935 will, left it to the capital for museum purposes. In the building complex, long called the Schmidt Castle, the City Museum's collections of urban history and fine arts were placed. The museum was severely damaged in 1944–45 and also suffered damage in the November 1956 fights. Since then, most of the former convent building has been renovated, and the former church building, converted into a modern exhibition space, welcomes visitors. In the latter, besides temporary exhibitions, serious music performances and other occasional events are also often held.

Collections

The range of the urban‑history collections is extremely diverse. Among the particularly rich or famous collections are, among others:

With nearly two hundred thousand photographs, the photo archive is probably the museum’s richest collection, which also includes city photographs taken by György Klösz at the end of the 19th century.

An extremely important source of information is the museum’s also rich collection of maps, manuscripts and printed materials; its earliest printed item dates from the 15th century.

The technical collection includes, among others, the Ganz collection, containing the world’s first transformer (1885), as well as the weapons and watch collections. From the latter, a few fine pieces can be seen in the permanent exhibition.

The signboard collection preserves valuable memories of the capital’s commercial life; the permanent exhibition also begins with the presentation of several shops and signboards.

The textile collection of about 3000 pieces provides information about the clothing, lifestyle, taste and the periodic changes in fashion of the city’s inhabitants.

The oldest parts of the poster collection date from the century turn. Some pieces of the collection come from such renowned artists as József Rippl‑Rónai, János Vaszary or Sándor Bortnyik.

Previously a valuable furniture collection was also part of the permanent exhibition, but its presentation has ceased.

Permanent exhibitions

The permanent exhibition in the museum – corresponding to the two large collection groups – consists of a city‑history and a fine‑arts presentation, which are also divided into several sections.

As an introduction to the historical part we get a glimpse of the world of Pest‑Buda shops and guesthouses, from the museum’s sign collection. This includes the room where the former downtown Arany Oroszlán pharmacy’s Biedermeier‑style furnishings and surviving crockery from the 1830s can be seen.

The capital’s antiquities – Public and private spaces 1780–1940

An exhibition covering the main periods of the capital’s history can be seen on the upper floor. Its first part runs from 1780 to 1873, i.e., up to the year of the unification of Buda, Pest and Óbuda, the second part gives an overview of the period from the city’s unification to 1940.

The Museum also offers a glimpse into its own history: it presents the former City Museum’s City Park building (oil painting), the exhibition halls opened in 1907 (photos), and besides the pictures also evokes the distant past with the layout style of the first part.

The capital's antiquities (1780–1873). The first section to the right of the main staircase presents the pre‑1873 Pest‑Buda memories, with an emphasis on the memories of reform‑era Pest. This was the age of great initiatives, when the city's development also accelerated. Contemporary city views testify to this, but especially the plans of Pest's newly built churches, classicist palaces, the forms of factories that arose at that time, their printed forms, ornate‑header invoices, price lists. Appear (mainly in drawings, sections on the exhibition) the scenes of urban bourgeois life such as parks, baths (the Imperial Bath, lithography), restaurants, theatres (the first National Theatre). The lifestyle of the more refined layers is conveyed by apartment fragments, porcelain tableware, silver objects.

Public and private rooms (1873–1940). The three rooms to the left of the main staircase each evoke a period and with it a contemporary style. After the unification of the city and in preparation for the millennial celebrations a new upswing began. This period is indicated in the exhibition, among others, by Miklós Ybl (the Opera House), Imre Steindl (the Pest New City Hall (V. Váci Street 62‑64) neo‑Renaissance building designs), or photographer György Klösz’s city views (e.g., the photo of Andrássy Avenue freshly planted with saplings, around 1880). From the nearly two decades after the millennium (1896‑1918) the exhibition mainly highlights the Art Nouveau taste world and conveys it with bourgeois apartment furnishings, a series of finely shaped decorative objects and serving dishes. Finally, in the third room the modernist clean, geometric building designs, its utilitarian objects (tube furniture), and its constructivist stylistic aspirations (Robert Berény’s advertising graphics, Lajos Kassák’s pictures) conclude the permanent exhibition covering more than one and a half centuries.