The Gross Arnold Gallery is holding a chamber exhibition, with works offered for sale, from the collection originating from the forester’s lodge in Dürrenhembach.
Imre Varga was born in Mezőberény in 1931. His parents divorced, and from early childhood until his school-leaving exams he was raised by his maternal grandparents in Oradea (Nagyvárad). It was there that he attended the Szent László secondary school together with Gross Arnold. He earned his degree in forestry engineering in Brașov (Brassó); after university he lived in Gödöllő and worked for the local forestry company, and nature conservation was close to his heart. As chief engineer of the National Office for Nature Conservation, he took part in establishing new protected natural areas.
From 1977 he worked as a forestry engineer for the Faber-Castell family of counts in Germany, famed for their excellent pencils; he retired from there at 65 but continued working actively until the age of 85, most recently in the archives.
With his wife and two children he lived in a forester’s house in the village of Dürrenhembach, about 20 kilometers south of Nuremberg. He kept in touch with Gross Arnold until the end of his life; they often visited him in Budapest, bringing pencils, etching inks and model railways in exchange for the works. Arnold also visited them several times, and on one occasion captured the forester’s house in watercolor. The nature- and art-loving collector passed away in Nuremberg in December 2022.
Alongside his etchings, he had also kept, ever since their student years in Oradea, one of Gross’s funny caricatures of their teacher István Kegyes — it was over a similar drawing that the Gross brothers were once thrown into a lock-up. Arnold later recalled it this way in an interview:
“I had a teacher named István Kegyes, our form master, the Latin teacher. He was graying, over fifty, and he seemed to resemble Stalin. I was always drawing this teacher — as a caveman, as this, as that, even on the blackboard — and the kids in class would roar with laughter. And weeks after the Russians came in, I drew a figure in wax crayon on a big tabletop: this teacher’s head, with a cap floating above it, one half in German style, the other with a Russian star. And it was lucky that I wrote on it: Long live Marshal Kegyes. He had a moustache like Hitler’s, and the uniform too was half Russian, half German, with badges. But I had no idea what it all meant. And toward evening a two-horse carriage arrived with a high-ranking officer. A young man came up saying he was looking for the two Gross boys. My father happily said here they are, these are the ones. Well then, come along. They took us off toward the town hall — the most beautiful one in Oradea. And when we got out, I thought, my, this is where they are bringing us — but they took us straight down to the cellar. We did not know that down there was a prison. We each got a separate cell, my brother and I. No dinner there, nothing; we did not know what was happening. The next day around 11 o’clock a warder came, and they took us over to the big prison. There in the corridor we finally got some warm food and an afternoon snack too, but we still did not know why we were there. In the evening, when it was already dark, they suddenly told us we could go home… My father recounted that, fortunately, he had found the other drawings, and then they saw that it was a teacher. They sawed out that plank and called in Kegyes — yes, that is him. Well, then they said fine, we could go home. Had it not been for those drawings, we would have been punished quite severely. But that way we got off. It was comical — the whole class kept laughing about it for weeks afterward.” – Interview with Barna Tátray, 1992
The exhibition, with works offered for sale, is on view from March 21, 2025, during opening hours at the Gross Arnold Gallery.
The catalogue of the exhibited works is available here.
