ŠTEFAN PROHÁSZKA TALLÓS A HIDDEN MODERNIST
Cselley-mansion Art Gallery (9200 Mosonmagyaróvár Fő utca 19.), 1st floor,
November 8. 2024 – April 9. 2025.
Štefan Prohászka Tallós was one of the defining characters and shapers of 20th-century Central European modernism, whose promising career was interrupted by professional failures and personal losses in the 1960s. After his death, a process began to ensure that his memory and the spiritual legacy of his work would not be lost. Thanks to this, the exhibition on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the artist's death undertakes to present the work of the painter in a new way. The exhibition not only presents his ars poetica through defining works but also tries to draw the viewer's attention to the modernity of his artworks. After his tragic death in 1974, the oeuvre of Štefan Prohászka Tallós was scattered and lost, only a few paintings and a large number of drawings were included in the Hansági Museum. Despite his tumultuous fate, the visual artist played a major role in contemporary art during the interwar period, and for this reason, he received serious attention in the 2000s through the research of Slovakian art historians like e.g. Katarína Bajcurová and Zsófia Kiss-Szemán. At the same time, the art trade has shown increasing attention to his works that have appeared in recent years. The preparation of the exhibition began with preliminary research, the results of which we intend to present through this expo.
The exhibition does not aim to present the entire known material of Štefan Prohászka-Tallós but tries to present the diversity of the visual artist's oeuvre through as many works of art as possible. Therefore, not only paintings or drawings but also objects from the orderly legacy will be visible. Prohászka's activities were most likely much more diverse than many could have thought. In Czechoslovakia during the interwar period, he not only worked for the private art market but also dealt with folk art, theater set design, and newspaper illustration. The creative activity of the work started from plein-air naturalism, passed through Russian constructivism, and then through realist expressionism into social realism and modern photo-naturalism.
He studied in Budapest in the class of György Leszkovszky and Jenő Haranghy at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts, and in 1923 he tasted the world of form-breaking avanguardism in Berlin and the Bauhaus Art School in Weimar. During the interwar period, he played an important role in the “Sarló movement” (Movement of the Sickle) and tried to create a modern art project that was both vernacular and social-shaping. For unknown reasons, he had to leave Somorja/Šamorín between 1947 and 1948, as a result of which he was able to form the "Painting and Drawing Course" in Mosonmagyaróvár under the auspices of the Fine Arts Working Group of Győr-Sopron County. The Kádár–regime in Hungary radically transformed the legal role of these vocational courses, so he could only survive on the pension of the National Fine Arts Fund of Hungary and some private tutoring.
The exhibition will not follow a chronological, but a theme-oriented concept for the art-loving viewer to come closer to understanding the artist's work. Most of the artifacts in the exhibition came from state public collections, which are complemented by rich material from private collections. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated 64-page small-monographic volume in Hungarian, which is also the second major Štefan Prohászka-Tallós volume since the 1979 Szíj Rezső handbook.
Curator of the exhibition: Bálint Juhász, Hansági Museum, Fine and Applied Arts Collection, curator-collection manager.
Štefan Prohászka Tallós- Dózsa,1954 (Hansági Museum)
Štefan Prohászka Tallós - Moson, 1960 (private collection)
Štefan Prohászka Tallós - The Animal Fair, 1937 (private collection)
Štefan Prohászka Tallós - The calvary, 1944-47 (Hansági Museum)