For the exhibition on the Unger playing-card making and artist family, my family and I did considerable work, which, however, Zoltán Székely categorically denied, even in an e-mail. We had to actively request an invitation, too! He tried to belittle my efforts, although I did bear the brunt. According to him, most information had already been printed somewhere already. But not only is it an achievement of its own to gather all the available information from a plethora of sources, my contribution really is considerable. He on the other hand made a series of grave mistakes and was not even able to correctly copy the date of baptism of the painter from me!
What parts of the exhibition did I provide or make available?
What follows is an exact description of all exhibition tables and exhibits:
The exhibtion space consisted of two rooms. In the first one nine out of ten larger exhibition boards could be found:
On the first one were written the name of the curator as well as the people and institutions who had had loaned artworks or were mentioned for their special achievements in the context of the exhibition. My name appeared there twice, but instead of my Dr. phil. (my German PhD) only an M. Phil. was mentioned. In reality I hold two M.A. degrees in addition to a Bavarian State Exam for teaching at grammer Schools (Gymnasium). Also it said that I worked in the nonexisting city Neu-Köln (Neu-Kölln, part of Berlin, was widely discussed as a negative example of German migration politics in Hungary at the time). Furthermore, my contribution was reduced to mere family history and not a word was said about our reconstruction of the historical playing-card production (different from the official press release), the partly reconstructed list of the painter’s works in oil, and the unusually difficult negotiation to loan the Holy Family painting as well as its transport at my own risk and expense. The fact that my parents procured scans of the Unger playing-cards kept at the Vienna Technical Museum from the Austrian National Library and funded by them did not find any mention, either.
There was another exhibition board depicting the family pedigree which I had given Zoltán Székely in written form in February 2010 (I could have drawn it like that had the museum told me to use the Ahnenblatt software). To it the curator had added a few details from a source (Házi) I had cited in my draft article a large part of the exhibition was based on. On my suggestion not only my family photos were added whenever possible, but also the faces of additional memebers from the family portrait.
Another exhibition board offered a brief account of the history of the Unger family including two 19th-century family group photos. That the photos were part of my family heirloom, for which I had given a single-use permit for the exhibition, was was only stated in German as Familienarchiv (family archives) in an otherwise Hungarian text.
Except for minor additions not requiring research, Zoltán Székely took the entire rest of the information from me, but made a mistake I had tried to avoid: During my research in Győr 2007 I had unearthed information that, at some point apparently, the Abbot’s House (today part of the museum) at one point had been #205 (later 210). This was the address I had found for Mátyás the Younger’s shop in 1857 and since they lived in that very building, I had assumed it had been the same. It was only later, particularly after my further research in 2010, that I began to realize that it was illogical (although not impossible) for one house to go under two different numbers in the same year. After investigating the tax records on microfilm at the Latter-Day-Saints in Neu-Ulm in 2010 I began to assume that it must have been the Lloyd building instead. I therefore only wrote the old address Fő tér 205 in the manuscript I sent to Zoltán Székely in May of that year. I assumed he would check the address for the exhibition, particularly since I had explicitely raised the question in an e-mail before, but he did not. Instead he wrote what I had written in my very first short article in Talon in 2009 for lack of better evidence, that it was the Abbot’s House. I would have alerted him of the fact again had he been willing to discuss the exhibition boards with me before the exhibition.
He also left out the important fact that Mátyás the Elder was a burgher of his city, and not a mere inhabitant. He categorically denied this possibility until the end, which is a grave mistake, I shall expand on elsewhere:
Altogether, he did not put any research of his own into this at all.
On the same wall a larger map of reform era Győr was hung.
Still another exhibition board gave a brief overview of playing-card making in Hungary and Győr. The information as well as the images of Unger playing-cards Székely had taken from sources cited directly or indirectly by me (by and large the article by Antal Jánoska and Ferenc Horváth from Talon in 2006 and the there cited history of Hungarian playing-cards by Jenö Kolb). In the final two paragraphs specifically on the Unger family Székley recounted the information I had submitted in my manuscript. He only added the information (which could easily be gleaned from one of the playing-cards in Kolb) that the first two playing-cards depicted were engraved by János Koller, a playing-card maker from Sopron, since they bore his signature. What he did not add is the fact that Koller, too, was a student of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts where he was trained as an engraver, nor did he elaborate on the significance of those two playing-cards engraved by him (cf my article in Acta Ethnographica from 2012).
The playing-card ad on the board was part of a series of ads placed in the local newspaper by Mátyás the Younger in 1845 and was also mentioned in my manuscript. The four German playing-cards depicted at the bottom of the exhibition board are kept in the collection of the Vienna Technical Museum (Inventory number: 84564). The scan was procured by my parents at their expense at the Austrian National Library in Vienna from the book on German playing-cards by Reisinger (Reisinger, Klaus (2003): Herz, Schelle, Laub, Eichel: Spielkarten mit deutschen Farben aus fünf Jahrhunderten ; Österreich unter den Habsburgern. Self-published) and given to the curator of the exhibition on the missing picture CD by me in February 2010.
In an e-mail from 19 August 2010 he had written: Wir können aus dem /Technisches Museum Wien/ die Unger-Spielkarten leider nicht leichen, weil es 2500 EUR kosten würde. Aber wir bestellen die Digitalfotos von beiden Paketen (es kostet nur 500 EUR). (We are unable to borrow the playing-cards from the Vienna Technical Museum because it would cost 2500 €. But we will ordert he digital photos (it only costs 500€; the spelling of the German text is as written by Székely)).
Since the scans are absolutely identical with mine and credit is given nowhere to the Vienna Technical Museum, did he really order the digital images and pay the 500€? He did not give credit for the scans to my parents, either, although I had explicitely asked him to do so in an e-mail. My parents also noticed that this had not been done at the opening of the exhibition and were rather disappointed.
The next exhibition board further exapanded on the Oedenburg/Sopron pattern and the images of the playing-cards used there at the top are also from the scans provided together with the background information on the depicted cards by my parents and me. The curator only added a picture of a centuries-old card added to it because it further illustrated the text plus an Oedenburg/Sopron card game by the Ungers from the collection of the Flóris Rómer Museum. I had also given the catalogue from the exhibition Spielkarten aus dem Biedermeier (Playing-cards from the biedermeier-era) held at the Vienna Technical Museum in 2000 to the curator to be scanned in February 2010. From these and my article manuscript it cannot have been overly time-consuming to write the three paragraphs that constitute the text on the exhibition boards. It should also be noted that he called Hans Schäufelein „Hans Leonhard Schäufelein“ (copied directly from Reisinger) although art historians usually consider it more correct to leave out the Leonhard – as is also customary in the artist’s hometown Nuremberg.
On one wall the family portrait from the National Gallery from 1843 was shown with my description of the family members. The curator commented on the elegant dress of the family members, which seemed to surprise him (most likely because he categorically denied the proven fact the family were burghers and not just inhabitants of their hometown, ie belonging to the upper crust of inhabitants, cf https://www.habsburger.net/en/chapter/high-society-how-having-rights-burgher-went-hand-hand-social-status ). Overall, the description was rather short and only claimed it was a biedermeier painting despite visible late Nazarene influence.
A Viennese pendulum clock had been hung on one wall, with which, it seems, they wanted to emulate the interior of a contemporary home of a bourgeoise family. However, my family had owned a picture clock painted by Alajos. It was listed in his brother Károly’s will and this, too, was something I had wanted to discuss with the curator Zoltán Székely pre-exhibition, but he acted completely disinterested in discussing any of the content with me after having received my manuscript (in which I had not mentioned it yet, because I only found the time to research into Viennese picture clocks after submitting).
Also displayed was a game table with biedermeier chairs and playing cards (not from the Unger family) placed on an oriental rug. A couple of cabinets featured some more Biedermeier playing-cards (again none from the Unger family, only similar) and a wooden Unger playing-card printing block. In another one a book from the city archives with the entry recording the Unger bankrupcy in 1839 was shown (I had informed Zoltán Székely of the existence of this source after submitting my article, but sadly had never heard back until the exhibition), a tax book from the 1830s listing Mátyás Unger the Elder as the owner of the house that then came under the hammer as a consequence of this, and, finally, Károly Unger‘s printed obituary in a booklet from the diocesan archives (a copy of which we had already obtained from the diocesan office in 1988).
On yet another exhibition board information on Alajos‘ educational and professional background was presented and my reconstruction of his oilwork based on the will of his brother I had found in 2007, with only some general information or some from my sources from my manuscript simply added. However, Zoltán Székely – just in his later article on Alajos‘ drawings – did not even manage and copy the correct date of baptism of the artist: Instead of 29 October he wrote 29 September 1814! Altogether, he did not do any research of his own on the artist and his oilwork!
The next exhibition board presented a reconstruction of the historical playing-card making, which my husband and I had reconstructed and which the museum had plagiarized structurally. It looked as though they had removed German engineer Professor Jürgen Wunderlich‘s reconstruction model at the last minute in order not to cite him and give him credit for his work (which was the only condition for them to use the model worth a minimum of 15,000 euros in the exhibition; it was later published in my articles in The Playing-card and in Acta Ethnographica). We had identified the key production steps in the right order (plus the minimum amount of space needed for a workshop like this). The proper reconstruction had been a rather time-consuming endeavor (based not just on the literature, but also a series of practical experiments carried out to determine accurate process times), ie much thought and work went into it and its proper visual representation.
Since the curator didn’t seem to want to ask us to provide a written description of each step, the museum had taken them from different French and German encyclopedias and messed it all up for this reason, according to Professor Jürgen Wunderlich, a renowned production expert.
Images mainly from the Krünitz Technical Encyclopedia, which I had suggested as images for my article and the exhibition, were displayed.
On yet another exhibition board, in five short paragraphs the basic wood engraving and printing technique was explained with photos of the printing-blocks of Unger playing-card wrappers and one card as the main images. The printing technique had also been part of our reconstruction.
The press on display – exhibited along with a broom and a wooden Unger playing-card printing block — also gave an incorrect testimonial of how playing-cards were made at the time. It was not used as a printing-press, but rather to dry the sheets of paper used to make cards.
A final exhibition board showed the prints of various Unger playing-card wrappers with two brief paragraphs stating the obvious. Across the room some of them were shown as original prints in two cabinets with the odd original printing block.
Under the latter two exhibition boards a cabinet was arranged to display sheets of 16th-century playing-cards by Viennese playing-card maker Hans Bock as well as cards used as evidence in an 18th-century court trial.
The two other oil paintings on display there were the Recapture of Györ from 1840 as well as a Madonna or rather Holy Family painting. For both paintings a brief description was offered with nothing new on the battle painting that had already been displayed at exhibitions in Györ in 1972 and 1998. The description of the Holy Family painting was severely flawed: Zoltán Székely did not realize that it was a copy of a painting usually referred to as La vierge au bas-relief or Madonna del Bassorilievo by leonardesco Cesare da Sesto that was believed to be one by Leonardo himself during Alajos‘ lifetime. He only mentioned Raphael as a potential model. Before the exhibition I had already come across a similar holy family by da Sesto in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. I wanted to show and discuss this with him before the exhibition, but again he made it clear that he did not want to discuss the art with me under any circumstances.
In the second room a number of drawings – several of which were my own — by Unger and two copies of works of his main teacher at the Viennese Academy, Leopold Kupelwieser, by J. Rauch, and a print by an Italian artist copied by Alajos were displayed, each with a brief description stating author, materials used, and owner. The only exception were three drawings, two based on well-known antique statues (Resting Hermes, Hercules Farnese) and one by Hubert Maurer, which were described in somewhat more detail. The information on the latter concerned Maurer himself. Already there he incorrectly called Hubert Maurer Huber Maurer.
The only large exhibition board in the room rendered brief general and well-known information on the training received at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Huber Maurer again was written instead of Hubert Maurer – just like in his later article, where Zoltán Székely misspelled the name repeatedly, meaning it was definitely not just a one-off typo. In addition to this, the information that Alajos had studied at the Viennese Academy between 1833 and 1842 I had provided based on the primary sources at the academy’s archives (before me, all the literature claimed he had studied there only from 1836) was added that were confirmed by the handwritten notes on some of the drawings.. It was not made clear, however, that he seemed to have attended only one course there in 1833 only to return in 1836. These were the primary sources to confirm the information on some of the drawings found in 2009 and that the museum had got hold of (I had intended to loan the ones I had purchased in 2010 to the museum on a permanent basis, but because of how the curator and now museum director behaved I have since come to collect them). The final paragraph of the exhibition board by and large specified the different types of these.
A metal headbust could also be found in front of a closed door in between the drawings.
Furthermore, a cabinet displayed documents (printed school yearbooks and handwritten sources from the school archive in the diocesan archives) pertaining to the Unger family.
Overall, it is easy to see that the most time-consuming research and active pursue of artifacts and search for primary sources in various archives and libraries in addition to the rather difficult procurement of the Holy Family painting, all at our own expense, was done by my family and I. It is unbelievable that the curator made so many serious mistakes.
