In my soul I’m no conservative
Imre Romics, professor of urology
MúzeumCafé 9.
Professor Imre Romics is a man of much learning. He is in charge of the urology teaching hospital, pursues academic work and gives lectures on 20th-century Hungarian history. He is an art collector, historian and an enthusiastic museum-goer. Entering the Museum of Urology is like dropping by a medieval alchemist’s workshop. The professor immediately offers the information that in his childhood he first wanted to be an archaeologist, then an art historian. After listening for years to the romantic and sometimes heart-breaking stories of his brother, who was a doctor, he put aside his art history books and dipped into biology, chemistry and physics. His passion for the past is still alive, and although he no longer paints he continues to collect works of art. Then he talks about his ‘love affairs’: about history, ethnography, 1960s’ hard rock (his phone’s ringing tone is a classic rock-and-roll number), military history and, above all, about the artists of the Nagybánya School. His favourite is a private museum near Arnheim, the Kröller-Müller. “They have some hundred Van Goghs,” he enthuses. He passionately admires the painters of the Nagybánya Colony, especially the works of the so-called second generation including Oszkár Nagy, Béla Czóbel, Csaba Vilmos Perlrott and Sándor Ziffer. “When an exhibition of the paintings by the Nagybánya artists was held at the ArtMill in Szentendre, I went to see it at least three times,” he says. “I’m awfully conservative in manners and how I dress, but not inside.” And if he could set up an exhibition with money no obstacle? “It would be called ‘Beautiful’.”