Csontváry Museum — Attraction in Pécsi járás

What are massive surprise for uncultured Geordie… having never heard of Csontváry I was very excited to discover this museum. I had my dog with me, which I thought would be a problem. However, Ava, the amazing lady on reception offered to keep him behind the reception. He is very well trained and exceptionally patient. I’m not sure this service would be offered for your average untrained noisy dog. However, I must say a massive thanks to Eva.

The exhibition is brilliant. It covers examples from the full range of his career. The pencil sketches are experimental and represent immediate that he was not himself all together comfortable in. However, they are amazing. The classics as I’ve now discovered are on full display, including an awe, inspiring rendering of the Tatra mountains. This is definitely the highlight of my visit in Hungary. The entry ticket was about €15 And...

What a delight this exhibition offers. A pinch of alienation, a kind of budding surrealism is applied to the representations of humans mostly playing secondary roles on paintings. Expect large canvases with bold colours and intense contrasts spearheading future abstract forms as the XXth century advances towards avant-garde art movements. Your senses will be captured mostly by depictions of nature and its underlying stories. You need space to acquire sensations transmitted by the paintings and here you will have plenty of them. This is a unique collection from an amateur painter that has his own peculiar place in art history.

In spite of this all what brought me down is how the Museum is administered. You have to turn the wheel of time 50 years back to get what I mean. All so socialist....

Spent about an hour here. There is not a lot to see. Some very very large murals, colourful and interesting pictures by a single artist. He has a mostly colourful almost gaudily vivid style in many of his paintings with a naive distorted scale and perspective in many of them reminiscent of other more famous painters of the same era. Csontváry was a mostly self taught Artist who travelled outside Hungary extensively and was unappreciated and dismissed by Hungarians until 30 or so years after his death. An interesting scale replica of the Hungarian Crown is in the stairwell and interesting to see, especially if you have seen the original in the parliament. As a tourist it was affordable but I expect for locals it is...