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An exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain in the Jardin du Luxembourg attracted 21,000 people, and another 4 million saw a report on a Trabant parade on French television.
The institute published catalogues, in three languages, for two of the exhibitions it organised: Modernism, Bauhaus - Constructive Tendencies in Hungarian Art in 1910-1930 and The European School 1945-1948, the Freedom of Art and the Art of Freedom. The institute introduced French-language tours of its exhibitions twice a week in 2009. It also established the Vasarely Scholarship for artists with the help of the Ministry of Education and Culture. Hungary's National Culture Fund will call applications each year for the single scholarship from 2010.
The institute put up the State of Hungary André Kertész photography scholarship winners as well as six Klebelsberg scholarship researchers and scholars. Almost 1,200 artists, scholars and experts spent 2,000 nights at the institute.
This year, the institute will play an important role in the newly established Student Mobility Centre where French students can learn about scholarships in Hungary. The institute raised the profile of Hungarian institutions of higher education at the Salon de l'éducation. In 2009, 30pc more French people learned Hungarian at these schools.
Almost a hundred Hungarian bands applied to play abroad as part of a programme organised jointly by the Hungarian culture institutes in Paris, Bucharest, Vienna, Brussels, Warsaw and Bratislava. Fourteen groups performed at the Jazzycolors festival that the institute organised with other foreign cultural institutes in Paris.
The institute signed a contract with Clavis Films to operate a 60-seat art cinema in the building. The cinema, to show films from the Visegrad Four countries - Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia - will open in the spring of 2010, during which time Hungary holds the revolving V4 presidency.
The Paris Hungarian Institute covered about one-fifth of its expenditures with its own revenue in 2009.
