Painted Dreams

The majority of the exhibited material had been on display at the London Freud Museum between the 12th November 2003 and 18th January 2004.

The four outstanding artists: Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, Lajos Gulácsy, Anna Lesznai and Attila Sassy having individual artistic ouvre within the universal arts of their age can be traced back to the l9th century British art, connected to Freud 's scientific themes.
Our exhibition boasts a material gathered from major Hungarian and Slovakian public and private collections enlarged by the works of Lajos Kozma and Gyula Tichy.

In pieces of fine arts, what we also call the art of reality, inner vision has always had a prominent role. At the turn of the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century attention was directed towards inner images, by the side of the research of vision. It was at this time that in parallel with scientific and philosophical experimenting, representation of the invisible world became an aesthetic principle. Thus the role of tales, dreams, visions and imagination obtained greater significance in visual arts. In the same manner the notion and the definition of a picture has also changed and became more varied.
This exhibition aims at displaying the then new genres that blend with each other in various ways, never asking whether the painted drawn tales, dreams, visions be1ong to late symbolism, to post-impressionism, to secession or any other artistic trend. It is rather to discover the world of a new reality as we see it in arts or every day and also to accept it in this new way. We find that reality and the arts appear cosmically, totally as conceived in the Eden, representing the secret world of impulses, as depicted in a new manner by artists.

It was this new visual world that had been swept away by the First World War. Therefore we close down this phase of tales, visions and dreams with a final prominent work by Lajos Gulácsy. The beginning of this era was marked out rather arbitrarily with the choice of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, however his peculiar, pure vision of the world is very different from his younger contemporaries anyway.
The Ernst Museum exhibited 70 pieces - the largest collection on display so far - chosen from the artistic heritage of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka in 1930. It was also the Ernst Museum that exhibited retrospective1y a collection of Lajos Gulácsy - pieces on the 40th anniversary of the master’s birth. Added to this were works by Anna Lesznai. While preparing for the present exhibition we pay tribute the our predecessors and to the memory of the two masters, Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (born 150 years ago, in 1853) and to that of Lajos Gulácsy who died 70 years ago.

Therefore we can see some rarities at the present exhibition (gathered from Slovakia and dearly protected Gulácsy-paintings, -drawings from private collections), that can be reinterpreted on the basis of the central topic of this event.

The catalogue contains reproductions of works of arts and essays by Hungarian authors on artistic and psychological issues.

Katalin Keserü