The art collection of the Ferenczy Museum Centre has more than 10,000 pieces and is constantly growing. It contains important works by artists such as Károly Ferenczy, Béla Czóbel, Jenő Barcsay, Lajos Vajda, Dezső Korniss and Béla Kondor. The central exhibition of the Ferenczy Museum gives an insight into this unique collection.
A series of chamber exhibitions is now being launched in conjunction with the collective exhibition, which will run for three years and will include six exhibitions in total. Each exhibition, entitled Phantom Thread I In the Footsteps of Artists’ Wives, will feature a female figure, specifically the wives of the famous painters in the collection, who were often artists themselves.
But they also provided their husbands with many forms of support: running the household, taking on regular and occasional jobs, looking after the children, providing emotional security, modelling for the works, discussing theoretical dilemmas as intellectual partners, smoothing their husbands’ careers, and often taking a back seat or giving up their own ambitions.
The Phantom Thread thus presents the fates of women who have had an invisible influence on the history of art, and whose portraits may or may not capture their figures, but whose unwavering support, without which the world would be short of many outstanding works of art today, has never been recognised.
The aim of this series of exhibitions is to highlight the possibilities and equal importance of male and female roles, and the diversity of family-professional cooperation in the context of the social, economic and political conditions of the time. In this spirit, we have chosen life stories that exemplify the various ways in which women can take their place.
We begin by looking at the person of Julia Vajda, giving us an insight into the various scenes of her struggles. We get to know her better as a working mother who kept her family together, as a tireless pioneer of the professional careers of her first husband, Lajos Vajda, and her second husband, József Jakovits, and as a woman who was sensitive to fashion and dressed creatively in the face of scarcity.
The series features the following women:
Julia Vajda, wife of Lajos Vajda
Olga Fialka, wife of Károly Ferenczy.
Mária Modok, wife of Béla Czóbel
Lola Gálffy, wife of Andor Kántor
Margit Gráber, wife of Vilmos Csaba Perlrott
Kónya Réka, wife of Imre Bukta