Deák Collection - Municipal Gallery (Székesfehérvár)

The Deák Collection – Municipal Picture Gallery museum in Székesfehérvár.

The exhibition building

By merging a Baroque and Romantic residential building that preserved several medieval wall sections, a suitable exhibition space was created for the collection of Dénes Deák.

Organization

The Deák Collection museum exhibition space is one branch of the Municipal Picture Gallery of Székesfehérvár, established in 1994; the other branch of the picture gallery is the Pelikán Gallery exhibition space operating in the Pelikán courtyard, which collects contemporary works of visual art. The Municipal Picture Gallery serves the cause of modern Hungarian visual art of the 20th and 21st centuries with temporary exhibitions, events, and publications.

The Deák Collection

Dénes Deák (1931-1993), a Budapest art collector and patron, built a valuable collection of works by Hungarian 20th‑century visual artists from the 1960s to the 1990s. Having no heir, he donated his collection to Székesfehérvár, because he saw that the city does much to make modern Hungarian art publicly accessible. His hopes were not in vain; during his lifetime, in 1988 the Deák Collection exhibition space was opened, and after Dénes Deák’s death in 1993 they also committed to further enrich the collection with modern visual art works.

Modern visual art works require space worldwide, therefore another exhibition venue, the Pelikán Gallery, was also created in the city’s Pelikán courtyard. The two exhibition venues are jointly called the Municipal Picture Gallery. In our country, where unfortunately private collections (see for example the private collection of Lajos Ernst) were scattered in the storms of history, it is of incalculable importance that in Székesfehérvár the Deák Collection is intact and forms a permanent exhibition. Its intellectual value is almost incalculable, it provides an overview of the entire twentieth‑century Hungarian painting, which is also evident if we highlight a few names without aiming for completeness.