National Gallery searches for missing works by Pál Szinyei Merse

In search of missing works by Pál Szinyei Merse.

In 2020 the Hungarian National Gallery was commemorating the 175th anniversary of Pál Szinyei Merse’s birth and the centenary of his death. The memorial exhibition, which was planned for the anniversary but postponed to the beginning of 2021 due to the pandemic, seeks to present international parallels with the master’s art, using the findings of earlier research while exploring the stations of the Szinyei cult in the twentieth-century. The exhibition further attempts to clarify the artist’s hitherto relatively well-defined place in the history of Hungarian and universal art.

Thanks to the cult that was already developing in his lifetime, several monographs with fundamental statements were published on Szinyei during the twentieth century. The Hungarian National Gallery last presented his oeuvre at a large-scale exhibition in 1990, which was accompanied by an extensivemonograph (1990) by Anna Szinyei Merse, including a catalogue of the artist’s oeuvre.