Sunday, May 17, 2009

Kaldi Art Collection



















Kaldi was a well-known collector of Hungarian Art before the war. He is mentioned in a number of books describing the seizure of art in 1944 by Eichmann and the Hungarian Fascist authorities, as is his collection, which included three works by Munkacsy. We are aware of two of them. The first, Piano Lesson (in the greenhouse) was sold by his wife Kaldi Jenosne (we do not know yet her maiden name) in 1962 to the Munkacsy museum in a town in southeast Hungary. The second painting, Line of Trees, was sold at auction in Budapest in 2002 by individuals as yet unknown.

He had a very substantial rug and clock collection which according to the son of his attorney Ferenc Faludi, ended up on the famous "Gold Train" seized in Austria by US troops. The contents being hopelessly resorted to make the determination of provenance impossible, they were sold at auction in NYC during 1948, the proceeds being used to pay for the resettlement of Jewish refugees.

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