The exhibition is organized in the framework of the traditionally good professional cooperation between the Museum of Fine Arts - Hungarian National Gallery and the Csíki Szekler Museum, directed by György Szücs, art historian.  

The generation born at the beginning of the 1890s, including Vilmos Aba-Novák, István Szőnyi, Imre Nagy, Károly Patkó, Lajos Nándor Varga and Dávid Jándi, all had a common characteristic: their artistic careers were interrupted by the First World War, but afterwards they all studied at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts for a shorter or longer period. There they not only learned painting, but also etching in Viktor Olgyai's printmaking class. Their eyes were drawn to the dramatic and expressive style of the old masters, especially Rembrandt. Because of this similar interest and the renewal of the reproduced graphic style, they were regarded as the etching generation of the time. In the 1920s, as a result of the traumas of the world war and the revolutions, and as a reaction to the various avant-garde movements, there was a need throughout Europe for stability of outlook and spiritual harmony, which in the visual arts was expressed primarily in self-portraits and symbolic nude compositions that also evoked past eras. This attitude and stylistic adaptation can be summarised as neo-classicism. One of the most exciting representatives of this tendency in Hungary was Erzsébet Korb, who died young. Jenő Szőnyi, Jándi and Paizs Goebel visited Baia Mare as early as the war years, and later Kecskemét became an important location: Imre Nagy, Lajos Nándor Varga and the later famous set designer Vince Korda worked at the art camp around 1919-1920. In 1924 Imre Nagy moved back home to Jigodin-Ciuc, István Szőnyi settled in Zebegény in the Danube bend. In 1925, almost a small counter-colony was formed near Baia Mare, in Baia Sprie, where Vilmos Aba-Novák, Károly Patkó, Ernő Bánk and Imre Nagy also created several works. After the plastic, more iron paintings of the 1920s, partly as a result of the scholarship to Rome from 1928, a lighter, more transparent style of painting (István Szőnyi, Károly Patkó) developed in the following decade, while others developed a flat, colourful, decorative style (Vilmos Aba-Novák). Imre Nagy was a close friend of Aba-Novák, who visited him several times in Transylvania. Among the artists who came, Aba-Novák, Szőnyi and Lajos Nándor Varga became teachers at the College of Fine Arts in the 1930s.