Béla Czóbel Museum

The Béla Czóbel Museum is an exhibition venue operating within the Ferenczy Museum of Szentendre.

The building

The museum was exceptionally opened during the artist's lifetime, in 1975, on Várdomb. Its building was originally intended as a school in the 19th century. In the vestibule they placed a portrait sculpture of Béla Czóbel, and Imre Varga's work from that year.

The collection

Béla Czóbel (1883–1976) was a painter who, from the 1940s, worked in winter in Paris and in summer in Szentendre, in a post‑impressionist style, with his wife, Mária Modok.

The oeuvre of the classic of modern Hungarian painting was opened on February 5 2016 from new perspectives, presenting the renovated museum’s permanent exhibition, which shows significantly more works than before.

Several works that emerged from the depths of the storage, which had not previously been part of the permanent exhibition, can also be seen in the exhibition titled Re‑thought Czóbel in Szentendre, where visitors can literally look behind some of the museum’s masterworks; a few recently uncovered pictures had until now been hidden, having been painted over on the backs of other works. These “two‑sided” works are now viewable from both sides.

Based on the curatorial concept of Gergely Barki, the exhibition presents the painter’s career phases following the chronology of his oeuvre, divided into sections by location, showing from his start in Nagybánya through the Parisian Fauve period, his joining of the Eight, then the years in the Netherlands and the Berlin period among German expressionists, his return to Paris, and finally the long period of commuting between Paris and Szentendre that marked the zenith of his work.

The exhibition is built on the Ferenczy Museum Center's several hundred-piece Czóbel collection, but among others the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, the Katona József Museum in Kecskemét and the Julian Academy in Paris also lend works for the exhibition. In addition to report and documentary films processing Czóbel's art, an interactive information desk also helps a fuller understanding of his oeuvre. The museum's new publications, which are available in the likewise renewed shop, serve the same purpose.

According to the plans, a part of the permanent exhibition will be renewed from time to time: in the incoming mini-exhibitions, unlike the previous ones, greater emphasis will be placed on Czóbel's graphics, for which the Ferenczy Museum Center launched an independent program in 2016 for scientific processing.

An important artist

Czóbel, the defining, internationally ranked individual of modern Hungarian visual art, who from almost the beginning of his career, in a way recognized by his contemporaries, shaped the development of Hungarian painting and left his mark in several centers of European modernism. Already at the age of twenty‑three he exhibited in Paris, at the Salon des Indépendants, was a founding member of the Eight group in Hungary, but later also participated in the work of the Brücke group. Significant solo exhibitions of his works have been organized in Paris, Berlin and New York. In 1940 he settled in Szentendre. In addition to the largest domestic public collections, his works can be found in many major museums worldwide.

A special museum

Czóbel was the first painter whose museum was dedicated to him during his lifetime in Hungary. In the more than forty years since the opening of the building on Templomdomb in Szentendre, many people – including his daughter, Lisa Czóbel – have contributed to the enrichment of the collection, yet the permanent exhibition has changed hardly at all for decades. The exhibition has now been completely renewed. In addition to works selected from the museum’s own holdings, works from domestic and foreign collections have also been included in the exhibition – the latter were taken on long‑term deposit by the museum. The building itself has been renewed inside and out: in addition to structural reinforcement, reconstruction of the roof structure and façade renovation, new walls have also been built in the interior. A modern lighting and security system has been installed in the museum, and its interior garden has also been renewed.