The exhibition, at the Kieselbach Gallery, will include about 200 paintings on loan from more than ten museums and some fifty private collections. Its scope will even exceed that of the National Gallery's Egry exhibition in 1971.
József Egry (1883-1951), sometimes called the painter of Lake Balaton, enrolled at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts after two years spent at the Munich Academy and the Julian Academy of Paris. A study trip in 1911 took him to France and Belgium. He spent the years of the First World War in convalescence at Badacsonytomaj, on the banks of Lake Balaton. Touched by the beauty of the lake, he settled there in 1918 and set about capturing the continuously changing atmosphere of the scenery with a technique he developed himself, mixing oils and pastels. He had a close association with the artists of the Gresham Circle in the 1920s, and participated in many exhibitions in Budapest. After his death, a memorial museum opened in his home on the lake.
"József Egry was not a true landscape painter, reproducing in his pictures what he saw of interest in his environment. What he came upon by the lake was one of the great experiences of the century in the twenties and thirties: light, as much a preoccupation of architectural art as of fine art....The cosmos unfolding in a dazzle of water and light exercised an elemental influence on him, fed his imagination and inspired him throughout his life. Whatever he painted: fish, saints, rowers, sailing-boats or just the hillside opposite, he always gave an account of that great experience in his visions, where he seems to sense the origin of being, and make us sense it too," the art historian József Vadas wrote in his book Hungarian Masterpieces.
Kieselbach and Einspach have collaborated before on exhibitions intended to show a broader audience the works of little known Hungarian artists such as István Farkas, István Nagy, György Roman and Sándor Molnár.
