Our exhibitions in 2019

Twentieth-century art is at the focus of the exhibitions at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2019. Photographs, sculptures, paintings, the poor and the wealthy, reality and what lies beyond, Budapest, Weimar, London, Paris, i.e. all of Europe. The show featuring Salvador Dali and the surrealists will be the sensation of this summer and early autumn. The show beginning in late September will pay a brief but all the more meaningful tribute to Philip de László. This small but significant exhibition celebrates the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth in Budapest. It will display some of his greatest works from royal and private collections, highlighting his standing as Hungary’s greatest portrait painter of international reputation. The Gallery’s last exhibition in 2019 will open in the middle of December and will bring to the public the oeuvre of a prominent artists of Hungarian Surrealism, István Farkas, who was murdered in Auschwitz.

„I AM AN ARTIST OF THE WORLD…” PHILIP DE LÁSZLÓ (1869-1937)
Drawings Cabinet
27 September 2019 – 5 January 2020

Curators: Gábor Bellák, Sandra de Laszlo, Katherine Field, Beáta Somfalvi

This small but significant exhibition will mark the 150th anniversary of Philip de László’s birth in Budapest. Organised in collaboration with The de Laszlo Archive Trust, the display will show some 15 of the artist’s most distinguished international portraits. It is nearly 100 years since a solo exhibition of Philip de László’s work was held in Budapest, so this tribute is long overdue. The portraits have been chosen to show de László’s greatest artistic achievements, carefully selected to highlight to the public his importance as an Hungarian painter of worldwide reputation. The show will coincide with the publication of the Hungarian translation of Duff Hart-Davis and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons’s 2010 biography: Philip de László: His Life and Art.

The official webpage of The de Laszlo Archive Trust can be found here.

Lucy de László, the artist’s wife, 1918 © de Laszlo Foundation

ISTVÁN FARKAS (1887–1944)
FORSAKEN WORLD
12 December 2019 – 15 March 2020 

István Farkas, one of Hungary’s leading modernist painters, left behind a unique œuvre that defies stylistic categories. This exhibition displays pieces from his earliest period, through his time in Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s when he was regarded as one of the greatest painters of the École de Paris, to his works of the 1930s and early 1940s that often seem to presage his own tragic death. The art and personality of István Farkas captured the imagination of French critics such as the poet, André Salmon, who wrote a monograph on him in 1930 in which he stressed the artist’s “ability to express dreams with the most complete symbols of reality.” After the death of his father, József Wolfner, in 1932 Farkas returned to Budapest where, while keeping pace with his Parisian contemporaries, he went on to create his own very personal and symbolic visual language. In 1944 he was deported because of his Jewish origins and was killed upon arrival at Auschwitz. This monographic exhibition pays tribute to this great artist on the 75th anniversary of his death.