The Poster Collection started operation as a separate collection of the Museum of Modern History, founded in 1957. After the institutional merger in the early 1990s, it became part of the Department of Contemporary History of the Hungarian National Museum, from 2003 it was incorporated into the Historical Repository, and from 2022 it is a unit of the Department of Modern History. Its scope of collections is general, and related to political and state history. The earliest items are the proclamations of the 1848 Revolution and War of Independence. The collection keeps growing, with a great number of posters being added.
Contact Dragan Traian, dragan.traian@hnm.hu
Composition of the collection
Two-thirds of the collection is made up of typographical posters, with the remaining third made up of the much more spectacular and sought-after graphic posters. The works of prominent artists also appear in exhibitions, publications, textbooks and film; the list of names is far from complete: Dezső Bér, Mihály Bíró, Géza Faragó, Tibor Pólya, Lipót Sátory, Róbert Berény, Jenő Haranghy, György Konecsni, Tibor Gönczi-Gebhardt, Sándor Bortnyik, Bertalan Pór, Béla Uitz, Géza Bottlik, György Pál, Anna Tedesco, Pál Gábor, Ilona Fischer, Andor Bánhidi, István Czeglédi, Sándor Ék, Tibor Zala, László Soós, Éva Kemény, András Máté, György Kemény, József Árendás, Péter Pócs, Krisztof Duczky, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Ferenc Pintér, György Kara, István Orosz, and many others.
The collection consists of some 45,000 items, growing considerably each year, mostly with current materials. Its computer record-keeping is outstanding, with 6,000 high-quality digitised images in addition to textual data.
Revisionist propaganda leaflet from the 1920s.
Graphic designers Károly Gerster and Géza Mirkovszky won the poster competition to promote the 1896 Millennium Celebrations. The visual concept was realised in several versions and in several languages. It was the first truly spectacular Hungarian national advertising product, which was a great success with the public and later became a symbol of the event.
A significant part of the collection is related to Hungarian political life, with the main focus on elections. The 1922 election poster by Imre Földes illustrates the mobilising power of the poster in recurring political struggles throughout history. Produced in the initial period of consolidation politics associated with István Bethlen, it conveys a strong and clear message to the electorate in both image and text: the need to create political unity, to restore the country's economic recovery and to demand territorial revision.
The poster as a genre belongs to the group of printed graphics. To create it, the artist usually makes several designs using different techniques. The painted design is one of the defining stages of poster making, this is usually what the artist presents to the art jury. The Poster Collection contains a large number of poster designs, among them the topic on public health education is of particular importance to society. In Hungary, public campaigns against TB played a crucial role in fighting against the disease already in the period between the two world wars.
Posters have a prominent role in promoting civic activism within a society. In order to understand the dynamics of political transition in Hungary, the poster collection contains hundreds of wall posters, all of which have become iconic.
Hungary's most significant territorial revisionist success was achieved on 30 August 1940 with the Second Vienna Award, when it regained some 43,000 square kilometres of Transylvania, of which 54%, or 1.3 million, of the 2.4 million inhabitants declared themselves Hungarian in the 1941 census.
After suppressing the 1956 Revolution and War of Independence, the new regime tried to impose the narrative of counter-revolution on Hungarian society at all costs.
The poster was most likely displayed in public after the loss of the Great Hungarian Plain to the Soviet army. To maintain morale, the unknown artist depicts a terrifying vision of the infamous Siberian captivity, with the train going into white infinity, the Bolshevik soldier impersonating death, the bodies of children and women lying dead by the tracks.
Almost no families in Hungary remained intact of war, of arrests and deportations. The POW issue was one of the most important tasks for the Hungarian political leadership of the time. On 25 August 1945, at the suggestion of Mrs. Zoltán Tildy, a unified organisation was set up to repatriate and assist prisoners of war. The organisation ceased to exist on 31 October 1948 and its tasks were taken over by the Hungarian Red Cross.
