The gallery represents painters who tend to specialize in huge, colorful sensuous canvases. The couple who established the gallery must know all too well that their investment is unlikely to make it out of the red in the next hundred years.
The gallery is actually run by one of the owners, an exceptionally elegant lady in her mid (late?) thirties - the gallery bears her family name, an Irish name. Her husband and co-owner, a successful real estate dealer, is always present at the evening openings (perhaps they start late so that he can be there). He flaunts an unorthodox sartorial style. Sometimes he manages to look like a cross between a futures broker and a rock opera set designer.
With the opening of this gallery, contemporary Hungarian art inevitably began its long march towards being chic.
Dovin Gallery V. Galamb utca 6. Open 10
a.m.-6 p.m.
Sat. 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
The shop and gallery offered a bit of everything - from copies of Mackintosh and Rietveld through classic Breuer to recent Philippe Starck chairs and tables. Above is a spacious design studio, said to be frequently visited by the Russian nouveau riche for consultations about furnishing both their homes and new office buildings.
Early this year the owners opened their second gallery at a more predictable address, the southern end of Váci utca (just now being converted into a pedestrian zone). The new premises are in the basement of the New City Hall, which is a superb hundred-year- old Beaux Arts palace. This latest venture was calculatedly designed as a tool for owner Miklós Vincze's vision: to match the latest international design with recent Hungarian art - and lure his clients who buy modern furniture into buying some paintings, just to go with the furniture.
The space is highly original, capitalizing on the brick vaults and the random piping - things that are impossible to hide anyway. The gallery's name is coined from the names of its two owners:
VAM - Vincze Anna and Miklós.
VAM Design 1. VI. Király utca 20.
VAM Design 2: V. Váci utca 64.
The art schools (there were two of them) produced thousands of artists over the years who were all promised "careers," not to mention the prospect of living exclusively on art. All art school graduates were automatically co-opted by the "Fine Arts Fund of the People's Republic of Hungary," to which they had to pay a certain percentage of their earnings and from which they were promised pensions. The Fund was a powerful organization that ran all kinds of business ventures, capitalizing on its monopoly in publishing postcards, of all things.
The Fund also had a network of hideous, but extremely well-sited commercial galleries all over the country. These galleries had a crucial part in ruining the taste of at least two generations by popularizing "modern art," most of it naff, backward, sentimental pseudo-modernism, both figurative and abstract.
Just as for writers, the advent of liberty favored the very good and the very bad artists. The great mass in the middle between the two extremities, the vast majority, is now composed of artists who are frustrated, impoversihed, and forced to question their careers.
One of the remaining "Képcsarnok"
(Fine Art Fund) Galleries:
VI, Teréz körút 11.
But thousands were forced to recognize that they were becoming more and more weekend artists. They are art teachers, civil servants, paste-up artists at illustrated papers, graphic designers in the first place, artists in the second.
The Fine Arts Fund has meanwhile lost its monopolies, along with most of its marketable assets. Its obligation to pay pensions has remained, but without sufficient sources of income. It was turned into a quasi-foundation, a purse, into which the state puts money every year. This "purse" was fatefully mismanaged by its 21-member Board, of which 19 were artists (writers and musicians among them, since the new Foundation now included the former Literary Fund and Music Fund as well). Finally Santa Claus intervened, but not in time, and not as generously as his earlier, totalitarian counterpart.
Public Foundation for Creative Artists: VI. Báthori utca 10.
For a decade or so, in the fifties and early sixties, Varga was treated like a pariah. He came from a landowning family, and as a young man he had even been a fighter pilot in the Hungarian air force.
Later on, during the first "thaw," he let himself be lured into the role of "conspicuously-non-party-member-favored artist," trusting to fate and good luck that he could influence things for the better on the way. In the end, he was even "elected" as an MP in that parody of a Parliament which had four sessions a year, each a maximum of three days, one every season.
There was a year when he was said to have used about 75 per cent of the capacity of the one and only bronze statue foundry in Hungary. Gradually he fitted into the mould of the proverbial great Hungarian sculptor, who is known all over Europe, who blends tradition and modernity, and is often interviewed on TV. He has no less than 300 works accomplished and erected, a rare feat. His undoubted chef d'oeuvre is his Wallenberg monument, set in a remote part of Buda. In 1986, it needed considerable bravery to commemorate the Swedish diplomat, who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the war and finally vanished in the Gulag.
With the advent of democracy, Mr Varga again became a sort of a pariah: he was accused of being a kind of collaborator. He works mainly for Germany now, and recently a Bartók statue of his was erected in Brussels.
He spends quite a lot of time in his museum, a wise old man still of imposing presence, over six feet tall, with ultra-short silver hair, like a retired US Air Force four-star general.
You can easily run into him.
Speaks German and French well, but not English, as far as I know.
The Imre Varga Collection:
III. Laktanya utca 7.
It is a lovely place, even after some major alterations, not always carried out with the necessary expertize, so to speak. The right to live here was theoretically given to artists, not to their widows or offspring. But few of them ever left. Unfinished statues are scattered all around the place, even some finished totalitarian works of "art" by the one time notorious dean of the Academy of Fine Arts. Residents include a famous Hungarian writer- turned film director, his sculptor wife, and a brilliant illustrator with an interest in Oriental art. It is definitely worth the walk.
The other colony is a fine Art Nouveau block of flats with studios a hundred meters from the elegant Gellért Hotel, somewhat up the hill. It was built in 1903. Typical of the tenants here is the couple, both painters, who has a successful career in graphic design. They work a lot, as participants in the rat race. So they leave early and get back home late. The husband gets away for three weeks once or twice a year to a summer artists' colony in Kecskemét, about a hundred kilometers south of Budapest. During that time he does not want to hear about business. Even switches off his cell phone. Or at least its ringer.
Százados út Artists' Colony:
VIII. Százados út 3-13.
Block of Flats with Studios:
XI. Kelenhegyi út 12-14.
The last outpost is a resort called Szigliget, where there is a Writers' "Creativity Center," a big, yellow, dilapidated complex in a big estate that once belonged to the Esterházy's.
A descendant, cult figure/writer Péter Esterházy, traditionally spends three weeks there (with some of his four kids) in the beginning of August, always with the same bunch of friends - writers, musicians and artists.
It is no small privilege to be invited there, even if only to come by.
Szigligeti Alkotóház - Szigliget Creativity Center, Veszprém County.
Bartók 32
XI. Bartók Béla út
32. Tel: 186-9038
Bolt Galéria
VIII. Leonardo da Vinci utca 40.
Dovin
V. Galamb utca 6. Tel: 118-3673
Erdész Galéria
Szentendre, Bercsényi utca 4.
Tel: 0626 317-925
Galéria 56
V. Falk Miksa utca 7. Tel: 269-2529
Körmendi Galéria
II. Nagybányai út 25. Tel:
176-2110
Hans Knoll
VI. Liszt Ferenc tér 10. Tel: 121-1556
Pandora Galéria
VIII. Népszínház utca
42. Tel: 113-4927
Stúdió 1900
XIII. Balzac utca 30. Tel: 129-5553
Várfok 14
I. Várfok utca 14. Tel: 115-2165
VAM Design 2
V. Váci utca 64. Tel: 118-1594