THE NAGY IMRE GALLERY IS TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR RENOVATION!
The entire legacy can be divided into two parts: the life's work and the material legacy. The material environment that was in the house at the time of the artist's death has been preserved 'intact', supplemented by objects brought from his home in Cluj. Visitors can view one of the most complete museum collections in the area: everything from the non-smoking master's Nationale cigarette, used to create smoke when he was a beekeeper, to the last oil painting that was discontinued, has been preserved. Journals, artworks bought and given as gifts, painting and fishing equipment, scooters, household utensils, photographs, letters, records, chess sets, bee hives, and so on, all the small and large objects of everyday use accumulated over a long and very rich life.
Life's work of Imre Nagy (1893-1976), painter from Jigodin-Ciuc
His artistic genius is occasionally disputed, his personality never. Knowledge of his life's work is of particular importance to our community: it is a defining factor of consciousness and existence. His personal autonomy has been preserved throughout his 54 years of work. As a farmer and as a painter, he was a defining personality for his community. He was included in the Romanian artist classification and officially assessed in Romania, yet he belonged nowhere. He studied in Budapest and Kecskemét, initially with Alajos Stróbl, but soon changed genres and became a painter under Aladár Edvi Illés, Viktor Olgyay and later Imre Révész. His works from the mid-twenties to the late forties bear the same stylistic features and plastic characteristics as those of his contemporaries and fellow students: Vilmos Aba-Novák, Erzsébet Korb, Károly Patkó, István Szőnyi. No wonder, since they studied together, at the same time or in the same place. They also included Lajos Nándor Varga and Géza Vámszer, a drawing teacher, the latter, together with Imre Nagy, was a researcher of ethnography and museum founder in Miercurea Ciuc.
His early work is dominated by the representational style he mastered with his contemporaries mentioned above, but his art was marked by the adoption and following of many different trends. The influence of German Expressionism is also recognised in his paintings, and indeed he was fond of the painters of the German Low Countries, and during his study trips abroad he paid particular attention to the works of Bruegel. According to Sándor Mohy, a painter from Cluj, "Imre Nagy is a luminist; light is the protagonist in his works. (...) It doesn't matter to him what subject he is dealing with: portrait, nude or composition, - all his works are pulsating with light, saturated with imposing, evaluated forms."
Imre Nagy did not become a conscious follower of any movement, and yet he was a modern painter of the 20th century. According to Béla Abodi Nagy, a painter from Cluj, "Imre Nagy's truth, his modernity, cannot be denied. He painted a true epic poem of his nation. (...) Joy of life, sorrow, playfulness, merriment and drama, youth and old age chase and alternate without stopping in the living world of his painting; the tension of the contrast of large and strong lights, shadows, colours and forms, the movement, the bold spatial formation, the compositional architecture, with the power of the need to communicate, have been completed into a modern expressive plastic language."
He changed his painting style several times. Over time, his works became increasingly light. Initially, he used a pastel surface oil technique to create his landscapes with few or no figures, some of his nudes and portraits, composed from bird's-eye views. Then came his life portraits and thematic compositions based on woodcut studies, followed by his free-form compositions with mixed themes after a period of forced work in the sugar and cement factories in the 1950s, which approached the requirements of the socialist era.
His drawings are in pencil, ink and other techniques. He used watercolour as a notation and applied it as such; he produced portraits and landscapes, as well as life-like or snapshot sketches of compositions on several planes. The final form of his compositions was shaped by repeated use of the sketches, and the colours were chosen according to the changing light effects in Ciuc, which changed several times a day.
He painted his large compositions on canvas and veneer, mostly in oil, some in tempera. His compositional subjects are usually narrative in nature. Many of his works seem to begin with an environmental drawing, always setting the subject in a large landscape: the village, the village scene, the figures. Light and space were very important to him. In his thematic compositions, he also emphasises the scale of the figures - only heads at the bottom of the picture, in the foreground, and smaller and smaller figures in the middle and background - thus increasing the depth of the frame and the pictorial volume.
He was able to draw the attention of posterity to himself because he thought in community. He bequeathed almost his entire oeuvre to three cities in Szeklerland, according to the chronological order of the donation: in 1949 to Sfântu Gheorghe (69 pieces - Picture Gallery of the Szekler National Museum); in 1960 to Târgu Mures (130 pieces - Museum of Art); in 1976 to Miercurea Ciuc (6544 pieces - Szekler Museum of Ciuc).
The following institutions bought his works (not necessarily from the artist): Petőfi Literary Museum Budapest (35), Hungarian National Gallery (12), Cluj Art Museum (8), Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu, Bucharest Art Museum and Royal Gallery of London (4-4). In total, 6,810 of his works are in public collections, and the total oeuvre, which includes everything from the smallest sketch to the largest composition, exceeds 9,000.
Postal address: Galeria Nagy Imre, 530122 Miercurea Ciuc, Str. Pictor Nagy Imre nr. 175
Tel.: 0040 266 372 024
E-mail: nagyimregaleria@csikimuzeum.ro
