Palettes - Béla Czóbel's contacts in Paris and Hungary

<p><span style="font-size: 13.008px;">Our new permanent exhibition series explores the intricate network of Béla Czóbel’s social relationships, which was formed amid the turbulent changes that characterized European art at the beginning of the 20th century. In 2021, for the first time, we drew a parallel between Czóbel’s oeuvre and the work of his second wife, Mária Modok. Creating a sense of continuity, this time visitors can gain insight into the most important professional and personal relationships of the two artists.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.008px;">Intersecting artistic paths and shared journeys are traced through recollections, interviews, photographs and letters, along with rarely seen works from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery and the Rippl-Rónai Museum in Kaposvár, as well as the Deák Collection of the King St. Stephen Museum in Fehérvár, the Antal-Lustig Collection, and the collections of Gábor Klein, András Nagy, András Feuer and János Haas.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.008px;">In a manner exceptional for the Czóbel Museum (which has been in existence since 1975), artists that appear in this shared story – including such dominant figures, arriving from the direction of the French Nabis and Fauvists, the Hungarian Fauvists, and plein air painting, as József Rippl-Rónai, Károly Kernstok and Baron Ferenc Hatvany – are represented in the form of capsule exhibitions. Individual works are also showcased from the oeuvres of artists, such as Róbert Berény, Margit Gráber, István Ilosvai-Varga, Csaba Perlrott, Piroska Szántó, Lajos Tihanyi, Géza Vörös, and Sándor Ziffer, who played a special role in Czóbel and Modok’s separate pasts or their shared life as a couple.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.008px;">The Parisian atmosphere that had such a defining influence on Czóbel’s early international success is evoked by a graphic art section featuring artistic copies of works by Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne and Marc Chagall, as well as George Braque, in the original.</span></p>