Museums near Vasarely Museum

Kassák’s journals, A Tett and MA, in issues he set and laid out himself. Paintings and collages by his own hand, from the activism of the 1920s to the late constructions. Letters and papers about his collisions with authority, first the Horthy regime and then the communist one.

The Columbia press of the Landerer and Heckenast printing house, on which the National Song and the Twelve Points were printed on 15 March 1848. The collection of guild signs, the only one of its kind in Hungary. The Golden Lion pharmacy, its 1830s fittings moved here whole. The ruined nave of the church, where contemporary art is shown.

The water organ of AD 228, the only Roman organ to survive anywhere. Lajos Nagy found it in 1931 in the cellar of a burnt-out fire station: more than four hundred bronze parts. A Latin plate names the buyer, Gaius Iulius Viatorinus, commander of the fire brigade, who bought the instrument for his men. The tombstone of Aelia Sabina, wife of an organist, carries an inscription about her playing. Mosaic floors and a mithraeum stand out on the dig; the Painter’s House keeps its wall painting.

The Esterházy Madonna by Raphael, one panel out of the 637 paintings the state bought in 1870–1871. The Spanish rooms: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, Goya. 263 Dutch and Flemish pictures arrived in the same purchase. The Egyptian department holds coffins, stelae and burial goods. Among the old sculpture stands a bronze Horse and Rider that the museum connects with Leonardo da Vinci.

Liszt’s instruments, the pianos he played and taught on in these rooms. The desk and furniture of the flat, left where they stood. The library and scores carrying his markings. The chamber hall of the old Academy one floor below, where morning concerts are given on Saturdays at 11:00 from September.

The Oceania collection, about 14,500 objects, three quarters of them gathered by four men around 1900. Lajos Bíró brought six thousand things back from New Guinea between 1896 and 1901, along with three hundred photographs. 466 objects from the Congo came in 1910 from Emil Torday, who worked for the British Museum. The Ceramics Hall ranges the pottery of the world in rows, with no line drawn between home and abroad. Zoom, the second permanent display, is about how a gaze at another culture shifts.

Hungarian and European Art Nouveau: furniture, glass, ceramics and textiles of the turn of the twentieth century from the holdings of the Museum of Applied Arts. The villa itself, with its late nineteenth-century interiors.

The permanent display in 3,200 pull-out frames: nearly half a million stamps, laid out by country and by year. A frame is drawn from its cabinet by hand and pushed back again — looking here is done standing, one frame at a time. Hungarian issues from the first Austro-Hungarian stamps to the present, with proofs and misprints.

Late Gothic winged altarpieces: whole altar cabinets lifted out of parish churches in Upper Hungary and set in one hall. Picnic in May by Pál Szinyei Merse, painted in 1873 and refused by his contemporaries. The room of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, with The Lonely Cedar and Pilgrimage to the Cedars in Lebanon. Yawning Apprentice by Mihály Munkácsy. Turn-of-the-century sculpture and Hungarian modernism: József Rippl-Rónai, Károly Ferenczy, Lajos Gulácsy.

Gothic statues from the royal palace: more than sixty torsos that can be reassembled and thousands of fragments, found in 1974 in the filled-in cellar of a burgher house in front of the palace. They were carved for the court of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387–1437) by masters who had come from several parts of Europe; some went into the ground half finished. The Gothic Hall keeps its seat niches. The palace chapel and the cellars beneath it.