Archives of the Lectorate of Fine and Applied Arts

The Lectorate of Fine and Applied Arts, established in 1963 under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, was one of the most important executive institutions of cultural policy before the regime change. Essentially functioning as a bureau of art censorship, the Lectorate had a definitive role in regulating the Hungarian art scene until 1989. From 1963 to 1990, the Lectorate had authority in virtually every field of fine and applied arts, autonomous art, and design. The Lectorate’s decades-long operations are recorded in a collection of complexly diverse and irreplaceable documents, which is accessible in its entirety in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (ADK). The main portion of the Lectorate’s Archives consists of documentation of public works of art (together with the associated photographic material). The rest of the material is comprised of other documents, including a larger collection of official papers—which were transferred to the Lectorate in 1976—related to the organizational operations and professional activities of the Council of Applied Arts. Furthermore, the archives also contain documents related to the history of the Lectorate, as well as project proposals submitted for scholarship/grant applications (e.g. the Derkovits Scholarship and the Kállai Scholarship) and the minutes for meetings where exhibition proposals were evaluated for approval. After the closure of the Lectorate, and the subsequent years-long search for a new home, the entire material finally found its way to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts – Data Repository of the Hungarian National Gallery in 2014. From there, it was moved to its current location in 2021. In an effort to render the full material available for research, the processing and digitalisation of the nearly five hundred linear metres of records has been ongoing ever since.

 /Dániel Lőrinczi/