Hungarian National Gallery exhibition features over 20 unknown Vaszary paintings

Source: Hungarian National Gallery

An exhibition showing 24 completely unknown paintings of celebrated Hungarian artist János Vaszary (1867-1939) will open in the Hungarian National Gallery on Wednesday.

The 24 canvases form part of the altogether 40 Vaszary oil paintings experts discovered in two rolls during the process of inventorying the complete material held in the National Gallery that began in 2016, the director of the gallery told a press conference on Tuesday.

These works which “lay hidden” in the museum’s own collection, proved to be entirely unknown to everybody, even to art historians, László Baán said. “There were no known reproductions made of them, not even during Vaszary’s lifetime and had presumably entered the gallery’s collection directly from the artist’s studio,” he said.

“Our exhibition presents the most beautiful and most exciting, duly restored 24 paintings of the recently found treasure.”

The canvases represent virtually every period of Vaszary’s oeuvre: from his early impressionistic pieces to his expressive compositions, from his art deco works in Paris to his Danube Promenade pictures and seaside scenes with a Mediterranean atmosphere, Mariann Gergely, the exhibition’s curator, said.

The exhibition supplements the newly discovered paintings with other Vaszary masterpieces from the museum’s collection and less known works from private collections and drawings. It also shows a film about Vaszary’s life.

The exhibition entitled Vaszary Rediscovered will run until January 15.