"When I told my American friends that our gallery would host the press conference and introductory show for the Marcel Breuer retrospective, they simply did not want to believe me," said gallery owner László Böröcz.
The gallery showed a mini-exhibition of photographs of Breuer's buildings and two of his famous Wassily chairs, on loan from the Erdész Gallery in Szentendre.
The exhibition, to feature Breuer's drawings, architectural models and furniture, as well as old photographs and catalogues, will open at the Ludwig Museum on May 4.
The exhibition was first shown at the Vitra Design Museum of Weil am Rhein, in Germany, in 2003. Since then, it has travelled to Brussels, Glasgow and Madrid.
Ludwig Museum director Katalin Néray said the reason the museum, which shows mainly contemporary art, had decided to host the show and pay the EUR 40,000 lending fee was because there are no other museums in Hungary dedicated to showing architecture. She added that the Vitra Design Museum had negotiated with Budapest's Museum of Applied Arts as well as the Műcsarnok on hosting the exhibition, but neither had reached an agreement.
Breuer was born in the city of Pécs, in southwest Hungary, in 1902. He left Hungary in the 1920s to study, then teach at the Bauhaus school. He died in 1981.
Among the buildings Breuer designed are the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the IBM Campus in Boca Raton, Florida.
Breuer's best known furniture design was for the Wassily chair, the first tubular bent steel chair, made for the artist Wassily Kandinsky in 1925. The chair, which was partly inspired by a bicycle, became the starting point for a series of furniture all made from the same steel tube materials.
The exhibition will stay at the Ludwig Museum until June 10.
Author: Gabriella Valaczkay
