El Greco, Rippl-Rónai and Nemes
Marcell Nemes – legendary art collector and patron
MúzeumCafé 12.
Marcell Nemes of Jánoshalma (1866–1930) was one of the most important Hungarian art collectors in the early decades of the 20th century. His fame was primarily due to his collection of paintings, which consisted of more than one hundred contemporary Hungarian as well as old masters’ and modern foreign pictures. Yet he also compiled a large collection of Gothic wooden sculptures, tapestries, vestments and other art objects. In his own time his top quality French Impressionist works and his El Greco collection, which affected Nemes’s contemporaries as a revelation, were particularly appreciated. Although it was not Nemes who rediscovered El Greco, his name became inextricably linked with the Spanish master of Greek origin. Nemes was a ‘marchand-amateur’, to use the expression of the time. He financed his large-scale purchases using loans from friends or credit from banks. He would have liked his collection to remain intact, but his negotiations proved unsuccessful and as he was wont to overspend he had to part with a significant portion of his famous collection. Contemporary Hungarian cultural policy-makers unfortunately did nothing to acquire the unique art collection. As a result irreplaceable works left the country – paintings sold at auctions in Paris in 1913 and Amsterdam in 1928 included The Nativity by Sandro Botticelli (at present in the Columbia Museum of Art), Paul Cézanne’s Boy in Red Vest (at present in the Bührle-Stiftung, Zürich), The Judgement of Paris by Lucas Cranach (currently in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Children at Play by Francisco de Goya (at present in the Museo del Prado, Madrid), El Greco’s The Immaculate Conception (presently in The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection), Edouard Manet’s Rue Mosnier with Flags (at present in the Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Rembrandt’s Man with Plumed Hat (currently in The Art Institute of Chicago), Auguste Renoir’s The Heriot Family (today held by the Barnes Foundation, Merion), Jacopo Tintoretto’s Christ and the Adulteress (at present in the Statens Museum, Copenhagen) as well as Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life with Onions (currently in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo). In 1918 Marcell Nemes bought a house in the Bavarian capital Munich, where he lived from the beginning of the 1920s. Thanks to his good business sense, he soon regained ground. Moreover, during his Munich period his art collecting and dealing were conducted in an even more spectacular manner than before. He bought the Tutzing Mansion on the shore of Lake Starnberg and had it renewed from his own resources. He had a hunting lodge in the picturesque Garmisch-Partenkirchen (its present owner is Roman Abramovich) and he also acquired the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Canal Grande in Venice (today it houses the Peggy Guggenheim Museum). Nemes did not have children or other inheritors, thus his collection was widely dispersed after he died in autumn 1930 leaving behind considerable debts. Today in Hungary only those works of the formerly prominent collection can be found which Nemes donated to museums during his lifetime or items which were acquired by Mór Lipót Herzog and Ferenc Hatvany. Nemes donated old masters’ and modern works of art to the Museum of Fine Arts and in 1911 he bestowed a collection including some 80 modern Hungarian paintings on the town of Kecskemét. He also gave valuable objects to the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, galleries in Berlin and Munich, the Prado and the Louvre. In 1921 he donated El Greco’s Mary Magdalene, perhaps the most renown work in his El Greco collection, to the Fine Arts Museum.