Museums

Established as the local history collection of the town in 1951 and named after artist Károly Ferenczy, the museum was relocated to a historic monument building, the 18th-century Pajor Mansion in Kossuth Lajos Street in 2013. The Ferenczy Museum currently hosts temporary exhibitions: visitors can see 20th century and contemporary, Szentendre-related and contemporary art exhibitions.

The 19th-century building of the former sawmill is one of the most interesting and special exhibition venues in Hungary. Based on a idea of painters Dezső Korniss and Pál Deim, the gallery was opened to the general public on the initiative of For Szentendre’s Art Foundation in cooperation with the Szentendre Architects’ Club in June 1999. The aim of the founders was to establish a modern artists’ center. The museum currently hosts temporary exhibitions.

It is the atmosphere, the diverse, special spaces, and the over one and a half decades of professional history of the ArtMill that makes it a definitive center for contemporary art not only on a local, but also on an international scale. It is the third most important exhibition space in Hungary thanks to its features and its temporary exhibitions visited by a large number of people.

One of Szentendre’s most popular museums, opened in 1973, presents the lifework of Kossuth Prize-laureate ceramic artist Margit Kovács (1902–1977). The collection was donated in 1972 by the artist, who is considered to be the innovator of Hungarian ceramic art. The over 300 works, embracing the entire lifework of Kovács, are figural compositions. The second-floor gallery of the new wing presents the reconstruction of Margit Kovács’s home on Pozsonyi Road with her potter’s wheel.

The official copies of her most well-known ceramics are on display, too, so that the blind and visually impaired can also touch these in one of the first rooms.

The permanent exhibition featuring János Kmetty’s lifework was opened in 1981 in a former 18th-century Dalmatian trading house on the southern part of quare. The artist’s widow donated his husband’s legacy to the museum. It holds primarily graphics, atelier sketches, oil paintings from the ’60s, glass window designs and stained glass windows as well as some exceptionally valuable contemporary paintings.

The renovated Kmetty Museum re-opened on 11th December 2018 with the opening of the János Kmetty – An Unceasing Search exhibition.

A seminal figure of Hungarian painting with an international prestige, Béla Czóbel was the first painter to have a museum dedicated to him in Hungary in his own lifetime. Many have contributed to the collection – including his own daughter, Lisa Czóbel – since the Museum was opened in 1975, but the permanent exhibition changed little over the decades. However, when it came to creating the concept of the new permanent exhibition after the 2016 renovation of the museum, the emphasis was not on permanence. The core material itself, which selects from the holdings of the museum, will be renewed year after year, and a room will now be dedicated to Czóbel’s graphic works, which will receive more attention than formerly. Additionally, and in a break with the former practice, works from private and public collections will be on deposit and will be integrated into the structure of the permanent exhibition, adding nuances and new insights to what is an exceptional and formidably rich oeuvre.

Szentendre Gallery, hosting temporary exhibitions, is situated on the first floor of Trade House’s historic monument building on Szentendre’s impressive Main Square. Due to its traditional role and central situation it is one of the most significant exhibition spaces of the Ferenczy Museum Center.

The memorial museum presents Lajos Vajda’s surreal, expressive self-portraits, paintings, drawings, photomontages, and last works, the large-scale charcoal and ink drawings on wrapping paper. The Hungarian state purchased a significant part of the lifework from the artist’s widow, Júlia Vajda, in 1979 and donated one hundred pieces to the Ferenczy Museum.

The museum opened on 22 December 1986 in a porticoed bourgeois apartment built at the beginning of the last century offering a nice view of the Danube. During the Art Capital festival, the Museum houses temporary exhibitions; the permanent collection will be returned to the Museum following its full-scale renovation.

The Museum presents the lifework of tragic Imre Ámos and his wife, Margit Anna, and was opened in 1984. In 1991 the remains of Margit Anna were laid to eternal rest in the garden of the museum upon the request of the artist.

Currently, the Museum houses temporary exhibitions; the permanent collection will be returned to the Museum following its full-scale renovation.

Jenő Barcsay is a decisive artist of 20th-century Hungarian painting and graphic art. A representative of figurative constructivism, creator of mosaics and tapestries, and author of Anatomy for the Artist, Barcsay lived and worked in Szentendre throughout his long life.

In addition to the smaller-sized color compositions of intimate tone—including paintings inspired by Szentendre motifs—there are delicately drawn studies, two mosaics, and three monumental pieces of woven upholstery displayed in the Greek Revival bourgeois apartment located in Jenő Dumtsa Street which hosts the collection.

During the Art Capital festival, the Museum houses temporary exhibitions; the permanent collection will be returned to the Museum following its full-scale renovation.

The Roman Lapidarium is located between downtown Szentendre and Road 11. For over 400 years, from the second half of 1st century AD, the town played an important strategic role in the Danube bend as it was one of the most endangered parts of the limes, the border of Pannonia. A dense line of encampments and watchtowers protected the limes; a significant military power was present in the area that is today Szentendre, then called Ulcisia Castra. The craftsmen and merchants working for the military lived in the area of the canabæ west and south of the camps. The population of the Roman period was buried along the “limes-road,” the main road along the Danube leading towards Aquincum, but later a small, Early Christian tomb chapel was built, too, on the premises of the late Roman cemetery.