BUDAPEST (AFP) — Budapest's highbrow Museum of Fine Arts has staged its first-ever photography exhibition, causing a sensation with a novel show paying tribute to some of the best artists of the genre.
The display, entitled "Soul and Body - Kertesz to Mapplethorpe through the eyes of the greatest masters of photography", combines artworks from the museum's permanent collection with pictures by big names like Robert Capa and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as home-grown talent like Andre Kertesz and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
And visitors have come in masses: more than 30,000 people -- said to be the highest for a photo exhibit in Hungary -- have attended since the show opened in June. It runs until August 24.
"Photography is finally gaining momentum in Hungary, which is reflected by rising auction prices too," said curator Peter Baki.
"What happened in the 1970s in the United States and in the 1980s in western Europe is happening in Hungary today: people are starting to realise a good photo can be as valuable as a painting by Van Gogh," he said.
Baki grouped 220 pictures -- borrowed from Hungarian as well as foreign collections including New York's Modern Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris -- according to six different themes, rather than by chronological order.
"But all pictures revolve around the human being," he said.
There are portraits, nudes, men and women in society, in solitude, in misery and in war -- a searching approach with compelling juxtapositions.
Capa's black-and-white take of the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto in 1945 hangs, for example, alongside a colour shot of the World Trade Center's mangled steel frames after the September 11, 2001 attacks, comparing senseless destruction five decades apart.
In "Thomas", a 1987 picture by Mapplethorpe, the US photographer known for highly erotic portraits, a beautifully carved nude balances inside a giant wheel, recalling Leonardo da Vinci's drawing "Vitruvian Man", a naked man in a circle evoking Renaissance ideals of proportion and man as the measure of all things.
"The photograph is also a reference to Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, where for the first time, churchgoers could admire the articulated movements of the muscles," said Dora Lovass, a guide at the exhibit.
About half of the photos are by well-known photographers, including Henri Cartier Bresson, Man Ray and Sebastiao Salgado. But a handful hold particular resonance here -- the native Hungarians Brassai, born Endre Halasz, Capa, born Endre Erno Friendmann, Andre Kertesz, Martin Munkacsi and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
Of the five, Capa appears frequently, including two of signature works -- the 1944 shot of a French woman, head shorn to mark her as a collaborator in German-occupied France of 1944, holding a baby and trailed by angry villagers out for revenge, and his 1936 picture of a Spanish soldier falling after being shot.
The exhibition runs through six hallways and spans the history of photography from 1887 to 2008.
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