Presentation of the Hungarian Publications of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank Published between 1950 and 1990 from a Visual Communication Perspective

Upon hearing the name ‘Magyar Nemzeti Bank’, most people unwittingly think of the main building near Szabadság tér in Budapest. This comes as no surprise, since it is a distinctive, one-of-a-kind building, and its architectural style, the groups of statues on its façade, and the windows adorning the interior are all astonishing works of leading architects, sculptors and applied artists. The building has housed the Bank’s professional activities for many decades and has symbolic significance in Hungarian and international financial and economic policy. Despite the fact that the Bank’s main building has been presented in many books through the painstakingly meticulous work of various authors, the professionals playing a part in the Bank’s past, their community and engagement as well as the Bank’s publications, i.e. the journals circulated internally or externally that provided a publishing opportunity for everyday information and experts’ serious professional works, are hardly mentioned. The various publications are interesting and valuable not only because of their visual appearance, but also because they represent a real rarity as regards to their content. If we go beyond the surface, we can take a peek behind the curtain and get to know, understand and in a sense relive all of the events in the Bank’s distant past (e.g. personal recollections from during and after the Second World War, the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath within the Bank). The accounts as well as the illustrations, caricatures and drawings found here are of exceptional quality and poke fun at the everyday events at an organisation and a discipline (economics) as a whole. Furthermore, sometimes we can also see the artists’ honest self-reflection about the social and political structure and atmosphere between 1945 and 1990. This short description, which is far from comprehensive, was compiled on the one hand to pique readers’ interest in visual communication, a topic rarely in the focus in economics, and on the other hand to pay tribute to the Bankszemle (Bank Review), and commemorate it on the 60th anniversary of its first publication.