The painter

Exhibition of paintings from the József Egry Memorial Museum in Badascony on the 120th anniversary of the painter's birth.

József Egry (1883-1951) was one of the most distinguished masters of modern Hungarian art and one of its most original and powerfully dramatic representatives in the twentieth century. In truth his art cannot be identified with any one trend.

He lived in Keszthely with his wife from 1918 and they spent the summers at their vineyard press house in Badacsonytomaj.

The world of the Balaton, with the hazy lights reflected by the surface of the lake, the shore, the reeds and the surrounding hills, signified for him not only personal experience and motifs, but transformed his painting and became determining factors in the formation of his individual voice and style. The house, earth, wood, water and sun play a part in his pictures not only as motifs or manifestations but as the projection of a cosmic sense of the world.
In his pictures figures appearing the Balaton area melt into the landscape, but biblical figures painted by Egry, such as Saint John the Baptist and Saint Christopher also find a home here.

The gentle colours of the Balaton hills, the rounded curves of the bay, become the basic elements of his clean compositions. But above all it is light which provides the power and the creation of form in his pictures, now spreading in rays from a central core, now opening up in concentric circles around the disc of the sun
In an earlier period Egry searched for well-constructed orderliness. Later he expressed himself in pictures of nature.

Remembering the 120th anniversary of the painter's birth, the present exhibition shows a selection of paintings and documents from the József Egry Memorial Museum in Badacsony, the Dezső Laczkó Museum in Veszprém and the Balaton Museum in Keszthely.