Dr Nóra Veszprémi MA PhD

Photograph of Dr Nóra Veszprémi

Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies
Honorary Research Fellow

Contact details

Address
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I am a research fellow working on the ERC-funded research project ‘Continuity and Rupture in Central European Art and Architecture, 1918-1939’. In the framework of the project, I will be examining how artists in the successor states of the Habsburg Empire engaged with the historical past.

Qualifications

  • MA in Art History and in Hungarian Language and Literature (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
  • PhD in Art History (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

Biography

Before joining the University of Birmingham in 2015 as a Leverhulme Research Fellow, I was a lecturer at the Institute of Art History, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Prior to that appointment, I worked as a curator at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest where I was responsible for the collection of nineteenth-century paintings and co-organized exhibitions such as the retrospective of the nineteenth-century Hungarian artist József Borsos (2009) and XIX: Art and Nation, a show on art and national identity in nineteenth-century Hungary (2010). I have held short research fellowships at the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna, University College London (funded by the Eötvös Scholarship of the Hungarian State) and at the University of Oxford. In 2015 I was awarded a CAA-Getty International Travel Grant to attend the annual conference of the College Art Association in New York.

Teaching

  • Prague, Budapest, Cracow: Art, Architecture and Politics in Central Europe 1867-1918

Research

My main field of research is nineteenth-century Hungarian and Central European art, and I am especially interested in the relationship between visual culture and national identity. My previous research has examined how mid-nineteenth-century Central European painting reflected and shaped ideas about ethnic character, and I have also explored how the same ideas influenced the reception of Romantic theories and imagery in Hungary. My book on the latter subject, ‘Romanticism and Popular Taste in Hungary 1820-1850,’ was published in Hungarian in 2015. My research on Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian and Austrian painting has been the subject of an essay published in The Art Bulletin in 2014. This topic evolved from my interest in the work of the painter József Borsos, whose retrospective exhibition I co-curated in 2009.

Between 2015 and 2018 I was a Leverhulme-funded Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Working with Professor Matthew Rampley, I participated in a project that examined the role of museums in the promotion of imperial, national and regional identities in Austria-Hungary between c. 1864 and 1918. Within the framework of the project, I examined the principles and practices of collecting and display, the professionalisation of museums, and the relationship between museums and art history as a scholarly discipline. 

From September 2018 I am a researcher on Professor Rampley’s new project ‘Continuity and Rupture in Central European Art and Architecture, 1918-1939’, which is funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. I am responsible for a sub-project entitled ‘Contested histories: monuments, memory, and representations of the historical past’, and I will be looking at how artists in the interwar period continued, transformed or rejected the motifs and figures that dominated the historical imagination of nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary.

Other activities

Publications

Books

  • Fölfújt pipere és költői mámor: Romantika és művészeti közízlés a reformkori Magyarországon [Overblown makeup and poetic frenzy: Romanticism and Popular Taste in Hungary 1820–1850] (Budapest: Könyvpont – L’Harmattan Press, 2015)

Edited books

  • XIX. Nemzet és művészet. Kép és önkép [The 19th Century. Art and Nation: Image and Self-Image], eds. Erzsébet Király, Enikő Róka and Nóra Veszprémi (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2010)
  • Borsos József festő és fotográfus (1821–1883) [József Borsos, Painter and Photographer 1821–1883], ed. Nóra Veszprémi (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2009)

Peer-reviewed journal articles

  • ‘Displaying the Periphery: The Upper-Hungarian Museum and the politics of regional museums in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’, Visual Resources, published online 2 July 2018, forthcoming in print https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2018.1483309
  • ‘An Introspective Pantheon: The Picture Gallery of the Hungarian National Museum in the Nineteenth Century,’ Journal of the History of Collections, published online 2 November 2017, forthcoming in print https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhx039
  • ‘The Emptiness behind the Mask: Rococo Revival in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Austrian and Hungarian Painting,’ in The Art Bulletin 96.4 (2014) 441–462.
  • ‘A Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum másolási naplója [The Registry of Copyists in the Hungarian National Museum],’ in Ars Hungarica 23.2 (2005): 305–313.
  • ‘Barabás Miklós, Petőfi Sándor és az Utazó cigánycsalád: Egy közös motívum a 19. századi magyar képzőművészetben és irodalomban [Miklós Barabás, Sándor Petőfi and the Travelling Gypsy Family: A Common Motif in 19th-Century Art and Literature],’ in Művészettörténeti Értesítő 51.3–4 (2002): 265–286. (with summary in English)

Book chapters

  • ‘The Shepherdess and the Myrmillo: The Sculptor István Ferenczy and the Reception of Classical Antiquity in Early-19th-Century Hungary,’ A Companion to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, eds Zara Martirosova Torlone, Dana Lacourse Munteanu and Dorota Dutsch (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 260–276.
  • ‘A magyar történeti festészet kezdetei? A mohácsi csata képi ábrázolásai a 18. század végén és a 19. század elején [The Beginnings of History Painting in Hungary? Visual Representations of the Battle of Mohács in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century], in A magyar emlékezethelyek kutatásának elméleti és módszertani alapjai [Researching Loci Memoriae in Hungary: Theory and Methodology], eds Pál S. Varga, Orsolya Száraz and Miklós Takács (Debrecen: Debrecen University Press, 2013), 261–273.
  • ‘Kísértetek a végtelen rónán: A magyar romantika rettenetes hagyománya” [Ghosts on the Endless Plain: The Tradition of Terror in Hungarian Romanticism],” in XIX. Nemzet és művészet. Kép és önkép [The 19th Century. Art and Nation: Image and Self-Image], eds. Erzsébet Király, Enikő Róka and Nóra Veszprémi (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2010), 139–166. (with summary in English)
  • ‘Virtuóz táncos az álarcosbálon: Borsos József stílusáról[A Virtuoso Dancer at the Masquerade: On József Borsos’s Style],’ in Borsos József festő és fotográfus (1821–1883) [József Borsos, Painter and Photographer 1821–1883], ed. Nóra Veszprémi (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2009), 30–51. (with summary in English)
  • ‘The Early Years of Mihály Munkácsy’s Career,’ Munkácsy in the World. Mihály Munkácsy’s Works in Private and Public Collections at Home and Abroad, ed. Ferenc Gosztonyi (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery – Szemimpex Kiadó, 2005), 137–139.
  • ‘Lakberendezés és színházi díszlet a századelőn: A Schmidt bútorgyár és a Vígszínház kapcsolata [Domestic Interiors and Theatre Design at the Turn of the Century: The Cooperation between the Schmidt furniture factory and the Víg Theatre],’ Egy közép-európai vállalkozó Budapesten. Schmidt Miksa bútorgyáros magyarországi tevékenysége és hagyatéka [A Central-European Entrepreneur in Hungary: The Furniture Factory Owner Max Schmidt], eds. Éva Horányi and Éva Kiss (Budapest: Budapest History Museum, 2001), 103–115. (with summary in German)

Translation

  • ‘Lajos Fülep, The task of Hungarian art history (1951) [introduction and English translation],’ Journal of Art Historiography 6.11 (2014) arthistoriography.wordpress.com/11-dec14/ Paper 11/NV1

Books for a general audience

  • Madarász Viktor (Budapest: Kossuth Publishing House, 2014)
  • (with Ildikó Fehér) Artists in the Mirror: Self-Portraits of Hungarian Artists from the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, exhibition catalogue (Budapest: Budapest History Museum, 2014)
  • Barabás (Budapest: Corvina Publishing House, 2009)