The collection

Sascha Wiederhold Kikötő

A significant part of Carl Laszlo’s collection was first exhibited in Hungary in 1996 at a large-scale exhibition in Műcsarnok. In 2006, ten years after the exhibition, nearly two hundred works of the collection have come back to Hungary, to the town of Veszprém.

Carl Laszlo’s full collection is a many-sided and varied collection encompassing the art of the past three hundred years. Besides the pieces of fine arts, the main line of the collection, it comprises a significant and thematically arranged collection of industrial art, Asian, design and pop-art pieces and a photo collection.

For the exhibition in Veszprém Carl Laszlo selected pieces from the fine arts collection – considered the most significant. The works put emphasis on three well-defined artistic periods of the twentieth century: the avant-garde tendencies of the 1910s and 1920s, the artistic endeavours of the period between the two World Wars and – through some works – the continuation of previous trends and the new artists emerging in the past 50 years.

The focal points of the exhibition, among others, are works by Hungarian artists such as István Beöthy, Sándor Bortnyik, Alfréd Forbát, Vilmos Huszár, Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy, János Mattis-Teutsch, and foreign artists like August Herbin, Thilo Maatsch, Marcello Morandini, Francis Picabia, Frantisek Kupka or Sascha Wiederhold.

Beothy István Aranysor

Compared to works of the artists representing the focal points of the exhibition, some of the displayed works are less known. In accordance with Carl Laszlo’s intention, these works are given special emphasis in the collection and deserve more attention by art historians: they help us acquire a more sophisticated picture about the art of different periods.

Although the works brought to Veszprém only represent a minor part of Carl Laszlo’s several thousand-strong collection, the exhibition, selected by the collector, yields an exciting cross-section and interpretation of certain important connections and tendencies of twentieth century Hungarian and international art.

The artistic advisor and curator of the exhibition displaying the Carl Laszlo Collection is art historian Gábor Sz. Szilágyi.