Holocaust Museum Shows "Forgotten" Artists

The exhibition, called "Belated Homecoming" aims "to return these artists to their well deserved place in the Hungarian art scene." It features 70 paintings and drawings by Edit Bán Kiss (1905- 1966), Béla Mészöly Munkás (1889-1942) and Zsigmond Wittmann (1909-1944).

 

Wittmann started his studies at Budapest's College of Fine Arts in 1929, but decided to continue his education in Berlin just a year earlier. After Hitler came to power, he protested the regime with his own posters and was forced to flee the country in 1933. He moved to Paris, where he became a member of the Montparnasse community in just a short time. He later volunteered for the French Army and died from injuries in 1944.

 

Mészöly Munkás was a member of the Free School in Nagybánya before he started his travels across Europe in 1920. He settled in Paris and was a member of the National Salon until 1938. He was deported and died at Auschwitz in October, 1942.

 

Bán Kiss studied at Budapest's College of Fine Arts and in Dusseldorf. She was deported to Ravensbrück in 1944. There she tried to poison herself, but her life was saved by a friend. She was put into forced labour at the Daimler-Benz aircraft engine plant in Genshagen. Bán Kiss returned to Budapest after liberation, exhibiting her sculptures and creating a bas-relief for the exterior wall of a synagogue in the north of the capital. She later moved to Casablanca, then to Paris, where she committed suicide in 1966.

 

Most of the works in the exhibition are from museums in Hungary, France and Germany.

 

The exhibition will be followed by several more that aim to offer visitors a chance to re-evaluate their picture of Hungarian art in the first half of the 20th century, said curator Júlia Cserba.

 

Author: Eszter Götz / Photo: MTI