Forgotten Szentendre

Restorer Krisztina Lővei and art collector János S. Nagy on the town and its art

MúzeumCafé 43.

The couple do a lot for Szent-endre, the town of artists – Krisztina Lővei, who restores paintings for the Ferenczy Museum, and her husband János S. Nagy, a pharmaceuticals researcher, chemist and, incidentally, art collector. Theirs is the broadest collection on the theme of Szent-endre and without them no exhibition could be organised about the art of the town and its old artists’ colony. They live in the town centre in a house inherited from their good friend, the artist Béla Onódi, which itself is like a museum, packed with paintings, all of them about Szentendre. As a child János Nagy knew most of the painters personally. MúzeumCafé spoke with them about Szentendre, the beginnings of the artists’ colony, their cooperation with the Ferenczy Museum, preservation of the pictures and the town, monument protection, painters and memory. Krisztina Lővei finished secondary school as a goldsmith, but she also learnt to make ceramics. She applied to study painting twice, submitting a reduced-sized water-colour copy of a Holbein portrait. Today it hangs on their bedroom wall. With the help of her tutor, Károly Klimó, she was finally accepted on the third occasion, but by then she had opted for the profession of restorer. However, she has continued to paint, with some breaks. Her paintings were displayed at the Verőce Museum in 2009 and at the House of Hungarians in Bratislava in 2010. Her works are mainly watercolours, still lifes and landscapes, primarily about Szentendre. János S. Nagy mainly collects works by the eight founding painters of the old Szentendre artists’ colony – not just paintings, but also documents and other materials about the colony, in fact everything which is related. In his view, this is a part of Hungarian culture that is not recognized enough.