Adalék Neményi Bertalan képzőművészeti gyűjteményéhez

Abstract

The Budapest lawyer Dr. Bertalan Neményi (1892-1947) was one of the notable figures of Hungarian art collection in the interwar period. He was mainly drawn to contemporary Hungarian artists, so he had considerable numbers of works by József Rippl-Rónai, Lajos Gulácsy and Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka. The reconstruction of his collection is very difficult as the bulk disappeared at the end of WWII. In early 1944 he deposited a considerable segment of his collection in thirteen locked wooden crates in the safe of the Hungarian General Credit Bank. The safe was left intact by the siege of the city, but the corps of the Soviet army specialized for gathering art works plundered the safe. On 19 March 1945 Neményi asked help for the search after his collection. The list included 98 paintings, some 350 graphic sheets and 2000 books. Several of his treasures were not put in the bank but in homes of private persons. When Neményi died unexpectedly in 1947, the existing pieces of the collection got into the art trade. Some were also found there from the stock once deposited in the bank. Most of the bank deposits, however, went to Moscow. The paper tries the reconstruct the collection and the intellectual portrait of the collector with the help of archival sources first published here.