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Zsuzsa Urbach at the Piliscsaba campus, 2003
(Image by János Jernyei Kiss) |
It is with fantastic sadness that I report the passing of artwork historian Zsuzsa (Susan) Urbach, Hungary’s foremost scholar of Early Netherlandish Portray. She was 87 decades outdated. She examined artwork heritage and archaeology at Eötvös Loránd College in Budapest – even though it was tough for her to get acknowledged to University in the early 1950s for political causes. Ending her scientific tests also took some time, as, immediately after the 1956 revolution, she used two a long time abroad (finding out in Munich and in London). Ultimately, she returned to Hungary and concluded her studies in 1959, acquiring a doctorate in 1963. She started working at the Assortment of Previous Grasp Paintings at the Museum of Fantastic Arts in 1966. She worked at the Museum until eventually her retirement in 1992. Despite the fact that she continued to review the Previous Masters, in 1994 she began a new venture: she proven the 2nd Section of the History of Art in Hungary, at the newly founded Faculty of Humanities at Pázmány Péter Catholic College, Piliscsaba. She was instrumental in building a extremely prosperous art heritage software, employing a range of youthful colleagues who train there to this working day.
The major field of study for Zsuzsa Urbach was Gothic paintings. She released groundbreaking reports on medieval iconography – on topics ranging from the Visitation (concentrating on the painting of Master M.S.) to the Nativity and the Question of St. Joseph to portrait iconography. She was among the very first ones to attract focus to copies of Early Netherlandish Portray – publishing important early copies of Hieronymus Bosch and Jan van Eyck in Budapest, among the other people. She was also a winner for the use of phototechnical examinations for medieval paintings in Hungary. At the Museum of Wonderful Arts, her attention concentrated on Early Netherlandish Portray, and she released a sequence of important experiments both of those in Hungary and overseas on the topic. She also wrote numerous smaller monographs on the holdings of Hungarian museums. Her analysis culminated in the monumental
catalogue of Early Netherlandish Paintings in the Museum of Wonderful Arts, which was published in two volumes by Brepols in 2014.
By the time I bought to know her, she was a person of the
grande dames of Hungarian artwork background. She was normally at the library of the Museum of Fine Arts, generally eager to discuss to youthful researchers. I remember these discussions fondly. In preparation for the 2006 exhibition on King and Emperor Sigismund, her connections designed doable the restoration of the duplicate of the Way to Calvary right after Jan van Eyck in Brussels. This panel is a highly intriguing merchandise in Old Learn Paintings collection in Budapest and its restoration was done at KIK/IRPA in Brussels. Volume 44 of
Acta Historiae Artium was committed to her in 2003 and a different
Festschrift, titled
Als Ich Can, was published by her colleagues and students for her 80est birthday in 2013. It is very well-identified that her students at Pázmány Péter College greatly admired her. For the reminiscences of her occupation, Hungarian-talking viewers are encouraged to read the job interview with her, published in
MúzeumCafé in 2014.
