The Museum of Applied Arts is to a large extent dependent on gifts and grants to acquire new items.
Donations and gifts
Since its foundation, the Museum has benefited greatly from donations of individual masterpieces and even whole collections. Nowadays, however, it is rare for works of great value or new categories of objects to find their way to the Museum by donation, so that those rare individuals who follow in the footsteps of their great predecessors are all the more to be appreciated.
In 2009, Rózsa Szanka, a member of the Small Graphics Circle of Friends, donated 450 Transylvanian small graphics works to the Museum. This filled a gap even in what is one of the world's largest ex libris collections.
Through Summa Artium, with the support of the Krisztina Polgár Memorial Fund, several outstanding works from Levente Thury's singular oeuvre were acquired for the Ceramics and Glass Collection.
Zoltán Takács, a designer with Herend Porcelain Manufactory, gifted one of his Japanese award-winning sets of porcelain.
A table and chair from the Japán Kávéház (Café) was donated by Ernst Gallery in 2009 and immediately included in the permanent exhibition. The Museum has long held the glass panel of the café's telephone booth, designed by József Rippl-Rónai and made by Miksa Róth, and the new acquisition is of particular interest: the Museum's architect Ödön Lechner may often have sat at this very table.
In late 2011, the Museum added a unique collection to its holdings when violinist Magda Bácsi donated the Chinese porcelain and Zsolnay ceramics she had collected throughout her life. Most of the collection consists of Chinese ceramics salvaged from shipwrecks. The Museum displayed these in the exhibition Treasures of sunken ships, which opened in December 2011.
Grants and purchases
Through the support of the Advisory Office for Fine and Applied Arts, contemporary items representing the latest trends from the 2009 exhibition "Works Realised", supported by the National Cultural Fund, were added to the Museum's collection. The report on use of the grant (in Hungarian) may be downloaded here.
Items shown in the Craft and Design exhibition in the Museum in 2008 were purchased from the artists after the generous award of a grant by the National Cultural Fund (NKA) in 2009, and were entered into the Museum's records in 2010. Some of the artists donated their work.
Support from the MaDok programme of present-day research has helped the Museum to expand its collection on several occasions, the most recent being the acquisition of the Rubik collection. This consists of outstanding logical toys, a sample of the work of the Rubik Studio.
Through an NKA grant, the Museum purchased from a private collection more than a dozen embossed copper-clad kitchen and household objects designed and made by the forgotten copper craftsman of Hungarian art nouveau, Gusztáv Jancsurák. Further information and downloads on these items and other grant purchases may be found under the menu item Grant reports.
In 2012, several major art works were purchased under the "Pulszky Salvage Programme" announced by the Museum College of the NKA. The Museum was awarded a grant of HUF 2,800,000 to purchase household items of outstandingly high standard, characteristic of 19th century bourgeois homes.
The grant was used to purchase items from a Budapest private collection, chosen to fit the Museum's collection philosophy. They are mostly characteristic items of furniture from 19th century bourgeois homes (seating and Eastern carpets), although they also include an outstanding item made by the famous Hungarian craftsman István Ferenczy (illustrated).
The gallery on the right has photographs of the rest of the purchases, and the grant report (in Hungarian) may be downloaded at the link below.