What are the Francophone Weeks?
The Institut Francais Budapest holds a Francophone Festival every year, on occasion of the International Francophonie Day on 20 March. The event is much more than people drinking loads of Bordeaux wine for weeks, singing La Marseillaise: beginning from 27 February, 9 cities offer related entertainment for a month.The Balatonfüred Francophone Weeks is also part of this series. In addition to the Picasso exhibition, a string quartet from Lausanne will also visit, plus you can watch Cocteau movies and enjoy a Hungarian Villon recital by the blues artists Hobo.
Meeting Picasso (7 Mar - 9 Aug)
In 1916, Jean Cocteau was 27. His novel Les enfants terrible and his film Orpehus were yet nowhere in sight, but he was already on great terms with the leading figures of avant garde in Paris, like Picasso and Modigliani. Despite the fact that we are talking about the WWI period, this company had fun between 12:30 and 16:30 on 12 August 1916 - which was immortalized in 29 photos taken by Cocteau with his mom's camera.
We know this in detail, since about 60 years after the pictures were shot, a French-born Swedish engineer uncovered their date through various, complex tests. The curator, Márton Orosz used this photo series at the Eger-based Kepes Institute last year for the exhibition titled One Day with Picasso. The exhibition in Füred will be different in as much it will also display pieces of the La Suite des Saltimbanques series (courtesy of the currently closed Museum of Fine Arts), paintings from American private collections, and objects, such as the christening records that include Picasso's entry.
Robert Capa - In Movement (22 Mar - 9 Aug)
The case is similar with the Robert Capa exhibition: it had been on display before, since the curator, Éva Fisli had organised a similar exhibition in Győr in 2011, from the photos of the Hungarian National Gallery. This In Movement re-interprets and complements the earlier one; it consists of about 50 pictures, and footages from wartime, peacetime and an East European tour. Already an American citizen, Capa visited Hungary in 1947–48, shooting photos also of Lake Balaton. Let's see how he tackled the the famous sunsets.
