Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei (Budapest, 2007)

ISTVÁN NÉMETH: Vanishing Hopes: The Last Will of Marcell Nemes - The Museum of Fine Arts' Acquisitions from the Nemes Estate

In the meantime the Budapest auctions set up to sell modern, Hungarian paintings from the Marcell Nemes Collection also took place." At the first auction, organised in the Ernst Museum on 4 December, 1933, there was a total of 126 items including several prominent works which had originally been also on the list of paintings that the Museum of Fine Arts wished to procure.

33 Although there is no record proving that the museum purchased any of this material, a work by Adolf Fényes entitled Poppyseed Cake entered the collection in 1934 in the form of a donation by Jenő Káldi, a government councillor.

34 The second Budapest auction of the Nemes estate took place on 23 April, 1934 and again in the Ernst Museum. The Museum of Fine Arts managed to acquire several of the pictures put up for auction this time. However, interestingly enough, of the works the museum purchased only one tallied with those that the institution had selected for itself earlier, even though several of these were still available for purchase.

35 It is a noteworthy fact that in the official report on the new acquisitions of the Museum of Fine Arts between 1931 and 1934 there is a reference to a total of only two items that were purchased at the aforementioned auction of the Nemes estate in 1934, although the archive documents clearly reveal that in addition to József Koszta's Landscape with Water and Sunflower

16 and József Rippl-Rónai's pastel painting entitled Embroidering Women1 the museum also acquired a landscape by Valér Ferenczy.

38 While Koszta's painting

—along with the Museum of Fine Arts' other Hungarian pictures

—was eventually transferred to the Hungarian National Gallery, it is interesting that there is no trace there of the Valér Ferenczy's landscape mentioned above.

39 On the other hand, Rippl-Rónai's pastel painting entitled Embroidering Women could not have been sent to the gallery since some years after its purchase in 1942 an exchange was made with Imre Sacher, an art collector from Losonc, for a picture by Gyula Rudnay entitled Family Circle.*® It was not possible to sell every piece at the Budapest auctions organised in 1933 and 1934 of the modern, Hungarian paintings from Marcell Nemes's collection, similarly to the previously mentioned auctions in Munich. According to the archive documents the remaining paintings and sculptures were purchased by the art dealer Ernő Frankel in March 1935 for approximately 1,000 pengős.

41 Included among these works was a famous portrait painted of Béla Czóbel in 1907 by Károly Kernstok, which was donated to the museum in the same year by József Frankel, the son of the aforementioned art dealer.

42 With this donation the number of works that entered the Museum of Fine Arts' collection from the Marcell Nemes estate rose to thirteen, yet this was still a smaller number than the prominent art collector had bequeathed to the institution in his last will. It was of little solace that Nemes's foreign creditors, to whom he had died owing a fortune, were apparently also left