Budapest by express delivery

The Royal Academy has unveiled the details of the exhibition that will come in place of the heralded Leichtenstein royal collection, whose loan was suddenly cancelled in December in a row between Prince Hans-Adam II and HM Revenue and Customs and his alleged acquisition of a painting that had been illegally exported from the UK. That show was to have been curated by Professor David Ekserdjian, the Renaissance art scholar, who was called in by the RA to be told his contract was off. As it happens, he was able to say, he had just come from Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts where he had been reviewing a show for the FT, and they might be interested in loaning… Not only were they interested – the exhibition will be seen as a cultural curtain raiser to Hungary’s presidency of the EC in 20111 – they were falling over themselves to be more obliging than his royal highness of Leichtenstein. ‘I would say “I wonder if we might borrow a small Leonardo” and they would say, “Of course, why not have two?”’ he says. So the Treasures from Budapest exhibition offering glorious stuff (Leonardo, Rembrandt, Raphael) mostly never seen abroad before, which would normally have taken three years to organise, has been turned round at curatorial break neck speed – nine months by the opening on September 25. There is only one shadow on the horizon: There is no sponsor, ‘and we have to have a sponsor, even in these difficult times’ said the RA’s ceo. Charles Saumarez Smith at the press launch today. ‘We will have a sponsor’ cut in the formidable exhibitions secretary, Kathleen Soriano firmly. There are discussion, I gather, among the Magyar oligarchs even as I write.