The same building taught the country’s painters, held its first exhibition hall and housed its academy of music. One institution stayed.
At a glance
The Hungarian University of Fine Arts descends from a drawing school founded in 1871, which began in a rented flat and moved to Andrássy Avenue in 1876. Its building, raised in the mid-1870s, carried three institutions in its time: the academy of fine arts, the first Műcsarnok — Hungary’s Kunsthalle — and the Academy of Music. The interiors hold frescoes by Károly Lotz, the painter who decorated much of official Budapest.
Key facts
- School founded: 1871, in a rented flat
- Moved to Andrássy Avenue: 1876, to number 71
- Building: dated 1877 by one source and 1875 by another
- Architect: Rauscher — given as Alajos Rauscher with Adolf Lang by one source, and as Lajos Rauscher (1845–1914), a teacher at the school, by two others
- The building also held: the first Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle) and the Academy of Music
- Today: the university, and the Ferenc Liszt memorial museum
- Interiors: frescoes by Károly Lotz
- The street: Andrássy Avenue, inscribed by UNESCO with the Budapest World Heritage site
- GPS: 47.5072, 19.0669 · Open in Google Maps
History
Hungary after the Compromise of 1867 was building a capital and the institutions to fill it. A national drawing school was founded in 1871 and started, as such things do, in rented rooms. Five years later it moved into a building of its own on the new avenue being cut through Pest — then called Sugár út, the Radial, and renamed for Count Gyula Andrássy.
The sources disagree about the building, which is ordinary for Budapest in these years: the date is given as 1875 or 1877, and the architect as Alajos Rauscher with Adolf Lang, or as Lajos Rauscher, a teacher at the school. The Budapest photographic archive names Rauscher Lajos.
What is not in doubt is how much the building carried. It held the academy of fine arts, the first Műcsarnok — the Kunsthalle that showed Hungarian art before the building on Heroes’ Square existed — and the Academy of Music. Three institutions that would each later need a palace of their own began here, in one house on one avenue.
The Lotz frescoes
Károly Lotz painted the ceilings. He is the painter of official Budapest in this period — the Opera, the Parliament, the basilica — and the work here is of the same decade. Frescoes inside a working art school are a particular kind of survival: they were made to be looked at by people learning to paint, and they still are.
What you see
A neo-Renaissance front on Andrássy Avenue, in the manner the avenue imposed on everything built along it: ordered bays, heavy cornice, stone below and stucco above. The avenue was planned as a single composition and is inscribed by UNESCO as part of the Budapest site, so the building is protected as a piece of a street as much as on its own account.
Sources & resources
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