The Béla Gruber Bequest

Béla Gruber (1936–1963) was a prominent figure in a generation of painters that started out in the 1960s. During his short life he spent only a few years painting and yet he left behind more than a thousand works. Béla Gruber’s works can be found in numerous public collections and permanent exhibitions. He entrusted the care and bequest of his paintings to his sister, Ágota Strakovitsné Gruber, who carried out this task dutifully for decades. In addition to taking stock of artworks and written records, she also continuously collected references to her brother’s art. In July 2017, she donated her collection of written records and art reviews to the Art Archive collection of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery. The Gruber bequest includes primary written sources (personal documents, letters, and journal entries) and secondary written sources such as the transcripts of exhibition opening speeches, newspaper articles and academic papers. Photographs and audiovisual material (which has since been digitized) also form part of the collection. The material compiled by Béla Gruber’s sister encompasses the artist’s entire lifetime. Furthermore, it also includes the posthumous reviews of his art: documentation and press coverage of every exhibition where the artist’s works were showcased up to the 2010s. The collected sources offer a coherent picture of Béla Gruber’s visual world and, in addition, can serve as the basis for research into the artistic legacy of Cezanne in the 1950s and 1960s.

/Judit Galácz/