Modern magyar rajzok 1900–1945, Válogatás Gombosi György művészettörténész gyűjteményéből (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/5)

SUMMARY Modern Hungarian Drawings 1900-1945 Selection from the collection of art historian György Gombosi Medveczky Jenő: Önarckép, 1937 György Gombosi (1904-1945) was one of the most important twentiethcentury Hungarian art historians. Music being his most decisive childhood experience, he entered the Budapest Academy of Music to study flute, In a short while, however, he broke off, and was drawn to the fine arts. He read art history in Berlin, obtaining a doctorate with his thesis on Spinello Aretino in 1926. His field of research being primarily mediaeval and renaissance art in Italy, he went on a study trip to Florence after his graduation, and spent two years at the Hungarian Historical Institute in Rome as a scholarship grantee. Upon returning home to Budapest in 1930, he worked as a volunteer trainee at the Museum of Fine Arts with the support of its director Elek Petrovics. He resigned this job after two years, and started out as a freelancer, identifying paintings at Ernst Museum and the Donath Art Dealer and having the art desk at the Est magazines. He also wrote the entries on Italian renaissance art for the progressively issued volumes of the Thieme-Becker art encyclopaedia and Éber'

s Művészeti lexikon (1935). He summed up his research results in several papers, studies and monographs published in the 1930s and 40s (Palma Vecchio, 1937; Moretto da Brescia, 1943; Rubens, manuscript). He began to have closer links with contemporary Hungarian artists from the middle of the 1930s. This was when he married the painter Judit Beck, and wrote a still authoritative monographic study of his father-in-law, the sculptor Fülöp Beck Ö. With the title The Drawings of Three Major Hungarian Masters, he arranged an exhibition of the works of József Rippl-Rónai, Károly Ferenczy and Károly Kernstok at the Tamás Gallery in the Beck Judit: Galamb- és liba tanulmányok, 1941