22. Auction
Auction
Date:
16 May 2003, 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Exhibitions
Visit our auction exhibition to view the paintings on sale!
22. Auction 16. 05. 2003.
22. Auction's details
THE STORY OF THE TURCK COLLECTION
The time when the Helmut TURCK collection was formed, that is, the time when he aquired the greater part of it, coincided with the latest heroic era of the Hungarian art market, around the political changes in the country. The businessman spent a lot of time in Hungary because of his interests here. He began to be interested in Hungarian paintings, when the state monopoly in the legal art market was beginning to crack. It was a great sensation for the art collectors when the Qualitas Gallery opened in the downtown of Budapest, at an extremely representative locale. Thus a real private gallery was born, where the Hungarian and foreign visitors could go to - besides the state-owned BÁV, of course. You could only see significant, high quality works of art on the walls of the Qualitas Gallery. The owner, Anna Szekeres and her colleauges had excellent relations with museums and collectors, so valuable, cherished pieces of private collections were on sale there, with strong art historical background, adequate documentation, thus they were purchased quite often for sensational prices of that time. It is not surprising, that our collector visited the Qualitas first, and became an outstanding client by and by. A great part of the collection was established in the beginning of the 1990s, and after the Qualitas' removal in 1994, the Vendemiaire Art Consulting assisted the collector to accomplish his collection. Naturally, he must have had an eye trained on foreign museums' treasures, to notice the significance of János Vaszary much before the boom in the prices of his works or to appreciate the Ecole de Paris paintings by Géza Vörös. In his choices we certainly find the apparent claim to international context, as well. He has found the European relation having purchased the Embroidering Women by Rippl - Rónai which is a masterpiece from his French (Nabis) period, and we can see the French orientation in the works by Béla Czóbel, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, Andor Basch, Izsák Perlmutter, Elemér Vass, as well. The most important piece of the French-oriented part of the collections the László Paál masterpiece, bought later. The German, expressive line can not be missing; it is present in the paintings by Aurél Bernáth, Frigyes Frank, Hugó Scheiber and Béla Kádár. The White - Dressed Girl by Béla Kontuly, as the Hungarian representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit, had become part of the collection in the times when the Hungarian relations of the style were not yet researched by art history.
Most of the pictures show the chief motif of establishing the whole collection. It was the firm intention to find the points in Hungarian painting where the living relation with universal art come to existence in the form of the chosen paintings.
The founder of the TURCK collection belongs to the collectors who have different periods during their life. The period of collecting the masterpieces of Hungarian painting has been turning to something new, in a different country, among different challenges. The pictures of his collection can continue their career in new collections, however with excellent provenance.
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