History : Exhibitions in Budapest

Whole engraved cycles on the Book of Revelation are rare, and the ones that decided how Europe pictured the end of the world are gathered here. Albrecht Dürer set the pattern, and printmakers kept inside it for two hundred years; what shifts from sheet to sheet is doctrine, and it shifts in the composition rather than beside it. Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop follow, the burin plates of Jean Duvet, the lithographs Odilon Redon published in 1899. Hungarians of the twentieth century have the last word, and above all Béla Kondor, whose “Apocalypse with Dolls and Machines” dates from 1956.

Photographs on boards in the Museum Garden, out of doors, marking the same anniversary of the Declaration of Independence as the large exhibition indoors. Any hour will do and no ticket is needed; the fuller account is inside the house.

A slab of limestone covered with pupils’ drawings, made somewhere between the thirteenth and the eleventh century BC, says more about the trade than any finished wall. That is the subject here: what materials were to hand, what rules governed the drawing, where the hand went wrong and how the mistake was put right. A relief recut for the princess Meritaten under Akhenaten is shown, and a sculptor’s model with a ram’s head from the Late Period. Most of it comes from the museum’s own Egyptian department, with loans from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and the Museo Egizio in Turin; the corrections themselves were found by laboratory work of the past few years. Curated by Katalin Anna Kóthay and Flóra Judit Kövei.

Hungarians left for the United States in their millions, and the show follows them from 1776 to the present — the two hundred and fiftieth year of the Declaration of Independence. They went penniless and they went comfortable, some after adventure and some away from something they would not name. A few rose; others found hard work and a country that stayed foreign to them, and nothing besides that; and most, having no great story to tell afterwards, built the second life without saying much about it at all. The museum has put the whole thing in its state rooms: the grand staircase, the space beneath the dome, the fireplace halls.

Louis I reigned from 1342 to 1382 and left Hungary among the richest kingdoms in Europe; the gold mines paid for it. Very little of that wealth is still above ground — a few pieces of goldsmith’s work and the gold florins — and most of what is shown came out of the earth at Visegrád, where the king kept his residence. The display is a small one in the medieval lapidarium, opened on 5 March, his birthday, for the seven hundredth anniversary. Since the castles and palaces are ruins, a film in the room rebuilds them by computation.

Forty-seven thousand photographs, ninety hours of film, recorded voices and close to four hundred objects: that is the archive the Belgian anthropologist Gustaaf Verswijver handed the museum four years ago, after half a century among the Mẽbêngôkre, whom the outside world calls the Kayapó. This is the first showing out of it. The pictures run from 1974 to 2019 and explain what body paint is made of, which myths a pattern points to, why a community reads a geometric design at a glance, and why ears and lips were stretched — the body carried a person’s standing and their age. Photographs by Martine de Rouck, who went into the field with him, hang alongside.

Eighth in the museum’s Contemporary Approaches series, in which an artist takes what is already in the collection and puts new work beside it. The subject this time is the stove: in a peasant house it did the heating and the cooking, and half the day was arranged around it. The show occupies the Ceramics Hall on level minus two, among the museum’s ceramics from around the world, and is to stay up for more than a year.