A Herman Ottó Múzeum évkönyve 49. (2010)

Egri Mária: Egy huszadik századi fametsző, Patay Mihály (1910-1956)

scholarship in autumn, 1940, from the Italian state. He spent a year at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, where he studied under Felice Carena. He visited all the major towns of Italy and spent several months in Italy's North African colonies. His works were displayed at the exhibitions of the artists' colony in Szolnok from 1935. His woodcuts were shown at several international exhibitions held in Warsaw and Cracow (1938), Rome, Milan, Florence, and Bologna (1940X1), the Venice Biennale (1942), Berlin, Königsberg, Leipzig, Munich, Dresden and Vienna (1942X3), and in Helsinki and Stockholm (1943). The outbreak of World War 2 interrupted Patay's artistic career and transformed the last ten years of his art. He fell ill while in a Soviet POW camp, and after returning to Hungary, he had no studio, no equipment, nor any opportunities for continuing with the art of woodcutting. He was obliged to perform other tasks after 1949. He held drawing courses for factory workers for his livelihood and accepted occasional commissions. From 1951 until his death, he worked in the Construction Planning Office of Szolnok. He rarely found the time to work with his chisels and gouges, and made pencil, ink and walnut oil drawings and aquarelles, using xylography for creating small graphics, ex libris prints and title pages. His untimely death robbed him of the possibility of making a fresh start. The Art Collection of the Damjanich János Museum in Szolnok contains sixty works by Patay, including the first or pilot prints of many famous pieces. These prints were acquired by the museum after the two memorial exhibitions organised in 1956 and 1980. The little publicity this talented artist and his creations received too can be linked to these two exhibitions. An overview of Patay's artistic oeuvre is one of the long-standing debts of Hungarian art history. The lack of research after his death can hardly be performed today. This study, presenting various documents and writings by his contemporaries, hopes to stimulate research on Patay's life and art. Mária Egri 409