The Budapest Museum Quarter is a proposed new cultural and tourist site to be located on Andrássy út in Budapest, Hungary, and has at its core the merger of the Hungarian National Gallery with the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts into one institution. The concept has been around since at least 2008 when the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts proposed combining the two collections. In 2010, the Fidesz political party included the idea in its election campaign. Several other Budapest museums would be affected by the plan, which faces not only economic and legal hurdles, but also criticism from both members of the public and art professionals alike.
Background
Hungarian national museum system
National museums in Hungary are those institutions that are state–owned and centrally financed. Many of them were created in the late 19th century under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as specialized complementary institutions to the original Hungarian National Museum. Although they received state sponsorship, the museums within this system — including the Museum of Natural History, Museum of Ethnography, Museum of Applied Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery and pre–World War II, the National Library and Archives — operated autonomously with their own board and endowment. However, with the introduction of Communism into Hungary in 1949, they lost their autonomy and were governed by the state under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and Culture.
The Hungarian National Museum is an important symbol of national identity because it played a major role in the anti-Habsburg Revolution of 1848 when the revolutionaries read their list of twelve demands, as well as a nationalistic poem on its front steps. The site is still used annually by the government to commemorate those events.
Fidesz government (2010)
Cultural policy
After winning a two–thirds parliamentary majority in the 2010 elections, Fidesz or the Hungarian Civic Union party began what was called a "hands–on cultural policy" that included appointing a media watchdog "that has the power to fine media outlets deemed to violate public interest, order and morals". It was suggested by members of the Hungarian art community that the center–right government was also influencing the appointment of a new director for the Budapest Art Hall (Műcsarnok) when the prior, Socialist–appointed incumbent's term ran out at the end of 2010. Francesca Von Habsburg was considered a favorite of the new, conservative government and a front–runner in the selection process. However, instead of choosing a candidate from this transparent process launched in November 2010, the Secretary of State for Culture Géza Szőcs (a recent Fidesz appointee) personally approved the decision to hire Gábor Gulyás, former director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Arts (MODEM) in Debrecen, Hungary.
In 2011, László Harsanyi, the director of the Holocaust Memorial Center and his chief historical adviser, Judit Molnár, were both relieved of their posts after the State Secretary for the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice, András Levente Gál, objected to the museum's display of an image of Hungary’s interwar leader Miklós Horthy. Saying that "this kind of historical inaccuracy [unjustifiably linking Hungary to the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps] creates unnecessary tension," Gál drew the wrath of dozens of local historians and social scientists. But according to Molnár, "we could not change the permanent exhibition to align with the new political expectations since we regard that as a falsification of history." A Fidesz party MP and former chairman of the parliamentary cultural and press committee László Simon was also appointed to lead the National Cultural Fund of Hungary, which until then had been independent of the government. Other early 2012 replacements included that of Győrgy Szabó, director of Trafó — a leading contemporary art center — by choreographer Yvette Bozsik, and the director of Budapest’s Új Szinház theater, István Márta by György Dörner, an actor with extreme right–wing political affiliations. According to art historian Éva Forgács, “the government wants to disrupt the fabric of Hungarian culture, by having leading cultural figures disappear and replacing them with their own.” However, Simon dismissed any controversies over his and similar appointments as being politically motivated by the opposition.