Review: Munkácsy: Story of a Worldwide Sensation at the Museum of Fine Arts

Alexander Faludy reviews the Museum of Fine Arts' Munkácsy exhibition ending on 30 March

Today, mention of Paris in the 1870s and 80s conjures the names of Monet, Pissarro, and Manet. For contemporaries, it was different: they thought of Mihály Munkácsy (1844-1900).

A painting’s early monetary value and its lasting reputation rarely coincide. Yet the former indexes the esteem that an artist enjoyed in his day. Munkácsy received 126,000 francs just for the original of his giant (417×636cm) Christ Before Pilate (1881), not counting fees for later canvas copies and paper prints. Meanwhile, Monet’s canvases were selling for between 800 and 1500 francs each; Manet’s work earned him just 75,000 francs across his lifetime.

Christ Before Pilate was a sensation during its initial (1881) two-month Parisian exhibition, in the garden pavilion of the mansion of Munkácsy’s dealer Charles Sedelmeyer — being viewed by 300,000 visitors. The painting was seen by two million people during its Europe-wide tour (1882-84). One million copperplate engravings were sold in Britain alone. By 1887, Munkácsy was the world’s most expensive living artist.

Art criticism canonises the Impressionists (rebels of their time), but this distorts our sense of “periphery” and “centre” historically, a tendency that this exhibition challenges. By highlighting Munkácsy’s versatility, the show also explodes the myth that the “mainstream” that the Impressionists rebelled against was only a matter of arid neo-classical convention.

Munkácsy himself moved from periphery to centre quite literally. Born, as Mihály Lieb, in Munkács (today Mukaceve, Ukraine), on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had a rags-to-riches life, rising from provincial joiner’s apprentice to internationally renowned artist.

En route, Munkácsy married a widowed baroness and suffered a series of nervous breakdowns. Impostor syndrome fuelled the manic energy with which he worked —but sometimes rendered him unable to work at all.

Munkácsy’s path to international acclaim opened up in 1869, when he was 25 and living in Düsseldorf. That year, the American tycoon and art collector William P. Wilstach bought The Condemned Cell for 10,000 francs before it was finished. Before taking it home to the States, Wilstach exhibited it at the annual Paris Salon (1870), where it won a gold medal for Munkácsy — launching his career.

Mihály Munkácsy: The Condemned Cell (1870). Source: The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Although The Condemned Cell is an ostensibly secular subject, it prefigures Munkácsy’s Christ Trilogy (the series that defines his oeuvre). As in Christ before Pilate and the later Ecce Homo (1896), Munkácsy here meditates on the psyche of a man facing death by judicial murder.

Hungarian custom permitted a prisoner’s family and friends to visit him three days before execution to say farewell and to give him money for a requiem mass. The money appears here in a dish on the floor in close alignment with the table on which the convict places his hand. Upon the white upper part of the cloth that dresses the table rest a crucifix (now mostly obscured by discolouration) and two candlesticks —giving the table an altar-like appearance.

The proximity to the crucifix of the guard’s rifle, with its menacing bayonet, hints at the piercing of Christ’s side in John 19.34. That linkage seems especially plausible, given that distinctively Johanine motifs would later define Munkácsy’s treatment of the crucifixion in Golgotha (1884). Meanwhile, the painting implies that the prisoner has abandoned faith: his bleak gaze is directed towards a ripped-up Bible on the floor. Golgotha is, unfortunately, the only Christ Trilogy painting to appear here in its original form (460 × 712cm). The others are represented only by smaller autograph copies.

Mihály Munkácsy: Golgotha (1884). Source: The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

When Golgotha was first exhibited to the public, it rested on the ground with its gold frame concealed, and viewers were railed off at a distance of ten metres. This created a sense of “sacred boundary” — recalling the railing off of an altar. It also allowed the painting to be displayed to maximally realistic effect, tricking viewers momentarily into thinking that they occupied the same visual space as the biblical scene.

This staging was combined with restricted lighting, and a mirror on a far wall equal in size to the painting, creating the most immersive viewing experience possible before cinema. Paradoxically, as people walked away from the scene they would be brought closer to it in the mirror — which also flattened the distance between them and the crucifixion. Perhaps, as they walked away, they would be inclined to identify with the man in blue, fleeing the scene with an intense expression on his face and clutching his chest for comfort.

The exhibition is, alas, ill-served by its catalogue and display labelling. Catalogue essays focus exclusively on Munkácsy’s business history and his wife’s skilful marketing strategies: there is no exploration of his paintings’ stylistic qualities — or their iconography. Exhibition labels here reliably communicate the paintings’ title, date, and medium, but rarely their significance.

Mihály Munkácsy: Paris Interior (1877). Source: The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Fortunately, despite these extraneous shortcomings, Munkácsy’s abundant gift for communicating texture, incident, and emotion provide more than enough to hold visitors’ rapt attention.

“Munkácsy: Story of a Worldwide Sensation” is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Dózsa György út 41, Budapest, until 30 March. www.mfab.hu

This article was first published in the Church Times on 28 February 2025.

Alexander Faludy