Exhibitions

The travel trunk

Regarding the summer travel season, August's item of the month is a 1920s Goyard travel trunk.

Based on the travel tags attached to it and the name on one of them, as well as the monogram (A.M) painted on its sides, it can be said that the first owner of the travel trunk was the French Olympic fencing champion Armand Massard.

Armand Massard (1884 – 1971) was born in Paris and won a gold medal in fencing at his first Olympics in Antwerp in 1920. He also competed in two more Olympics, in Paris in 1924 and Amsterdam in 1928. He won a total of one gold, one silver and one bronze medal. After an active sports career, he embarked on the path of sports diplomacy, becoming the president of the French Fencing Association. Between 1933 and 1967, he was the president of the French Olympic Committee, and for a time held the position of vice-president of the International Olympic Committee. In addition to sports diplomacy, he also worked as a journalist and was editor of several newspapers, such as La Liberté, La Presse and Le Figaro.

With this trunk he traveled among others to Alexandria in Egypt, Kitzbühel in Austria, or as a member of the official French delegation to the 1936 Winter Olympics in Germany in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, stayed at the Grand Hotel in Venice and traveled on the transatlantic flight of the shipping company French Line (Compagnie Générale Generale, first line Transatlantique-New York, Lemplantique class.

The manufacturer of the chest is the well-known French luxury goods company Maison Goyard, founded in 1792, which has been one of the leaders in the sector since then. Among other things, the uniqueness of the products is ensured by the Goyardine canvas, which was presented at the world exhibition in 1900 and was the most common in the period between the two world wars.

The object was added to the museum's collection in 2014 as a donation from the late skier Éva Kovács from Csikszereda, who said the suitcase was given to her by acquaintances in Bucharest. Becoming the property of the museum, it went through a complete conservation process. Cleaning was a more complicated process than usual due to the paper-based labels and the complex use of crate materials. Each type of material requires different treatment methods. Restorer Éva Benedek helped clean up the paper-based labels. The preservation of these labels has been vital in the conservation process as they provide essential information for the object's history.

The traveling trunk can be admired at the museum's ticket office from Tuesday to Sunday, daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Year

2023

Month

August

Type

History