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Thank you for considering supporting the Breznay Ganoczy Foundation. The Foundation's activities are financed solely by donations from people and entities of good will. We want to restoring and exhibit our Art Collection. You also participate in this mission!

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Grazie per aver pensato di sostenere la Fondazione Breznay Ganoczy. Le attività della Fondazione sono finanziati unicamente dalle donazioni delle persone e enti di buona volontà. Vogliamo salvare e poter esporre la nostra Collezione. Partecipa anche tu in questa missione !

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Thanks to the meticulous efforts of Mária Gánóczy over the last forty years in archiving, research, and documentation, the Breznay Gánóczy family has inherited a collection of several thousand works, from the early 19th Century to the present day. The Breznay Gánóczy Foundation was created in the summer of 2023 to preserve and promote this exceptional collection, which bears witness to a long European history of painting and, particularly, of women painters. The Foundation is now happy to announce its first projects.

The main missions of the Breznay Gánóczy Foundation are:

- to preserve the important artistic and cultural heritage constituted by the works of six generations of artists from the Breznay Gánóczy family, through conservation and restoration, research and documentation, and the acquisition of works and archival documents;

- to promote the works of the Breznay Gánóczy family to the public, in collaboration with art institutions, through exhibitions, events, the publishing of books and catalogs, the production of films and documentaries, and digital distribution;

- to raise public awareness of the handicaps caused by eye diseases, and to actively support initiatives aimed at welcoming blind and visually impaired people into art world institutions.

The Breznay Gánóczy Foundation is a non-commercial, non-profit organization whose activities are aimed at the public good.

The origins of the Breznay Gánóczy family of artists go back to the early 19th Century, with the collection of German art lover Eduard Bock. Taking advantage of his proximity to the art world, his two daughters Augusta and Amalia embarked on artistic careers.

We don’t know much yet about the first one, Augusta Bock (1847-1917). She was specialized in portraiture and genre painting, and traveled a lot, hence the few documents we have about her. We know she led an ethnographic project in the Balkan countries, where she traveled to draw scenes of daily life, accompanied by journalist Milena Mrazović.

The second daughter, Amalia Bock (1860-1926), also painted portraits. She founded an independent painting school in Hanover, before settling in Budapest with her husband Viktor Tardos Krenner (1866-1927), a painter of some of the frescoes in the Hungarian Parliament, and, like her, born into a family close to the arts.

Viktor Tardos Krenner was the son of József Krenner (1839-1920), director of the Hungarian National Museum’s mineralogy section and art lover, and Mária Máchik (1843-1895), a portrait painter appreciated by the Austro-Hungarian bourgeoisie of her day. The Foundation holds a series of drawings and watercolors by the latter, produced with a delicate, quasi-miniaturist technique.

Amália Bock and Viktor Tardos Krenner had a daughter, Amália Krenner (1898-1974), who also pursued a career as a portrait painter and produced many paintings depicting the sometimes burlesque daily life of the Hungarian capital from the 1920s to the 1940s. She married the scientist and amateur artist Sándor Gánóczy (1900-1977), and passed on her taste for observation to her daughter, Mária Gánóczy (b. 1927), painter and wife of the artist József Breznay (1916-2012), with whom she led a prolific artistic career, while raising nine children.

József Breznay received the Rome prize multiple times. During his long career, he explored figurative painting with great freedom, from large-scale naturalistic paintings to fantastic compositions, always with powerful colorism. His style had a major influence on the Hungarian art scene of the 20th Century.

Mária Gánóczy and József Breznay exhibited their work both in Hungary and abroad. Their travels throughout Europe during the Cold War period are documented by a large collection of paintings, as well as numerous 8mm films, photographs and handwritten documents, a treasure trove of material about recent European history, that we can discover through the eyes of artists.

Involved in the artistic circles of their time, these painters left numerous testimonies to European societies throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. One of the missions of the Breznay Gánóczy Foundation is to shed light on the life and work of a very active line of five women painters, at a time when art history has more readily documented the art of men.

This artistic and family history is also a history of the eye and, as the eye is an essential work tool for painters, the Breznay Gánóczy Foundation aims to promote information and research into eye diseases. Our two founding presidents, Mária and Alexandre Gánóczy, suffer from macular degeneration, a retinal disease that significantly reduces the field of vision. The first exhibition of the Breznay Gánóczy Foundation will be a retrospective of the painter Mária Gánóczy, in which a rich scientific mediation will introduce her most recent works, created despite her visual handicap.

The Foundation’s initial endowment is now being used to launch its activities, while its operation is ensured on a voluntary basis by its founders. Work is already underway to prepare the Foundation’s first touring exhibition (Munich, Budapest, Milan, Lugano). Work has also begun on inventorying the collection and archiving documentation.

Today, the Breznay Gánóczy Foundation is launching an appeal for donations to finance the restoration, packaging, insurance, and transport of the paintings to be shown in its first exhibition, which involves shipping works from several European countries. These costs amount to €15,000. Public sponsorship, if it reaches €25,000, will also enable the Foundation to publish a catalog that can be distributed to our donors who have contributed €80 or more.

The Breznay Gánóczy Foundation also needs to install museum-standard storage facilities to guarantee the integrity and conservation of its artistic and documentary collection, which is currently housed in unsuitable premises. This involves paying rent, as well as purchasing furniture and technical equipment. All donations received above the €25,000 target will be used for this purpose, which will be decisive in saving an exceptional collection.

The Foundation, along with the entire Breznay Gánóczy family and its staff, warmly thanks the generous donors who will enable it to carry out projects of general interest, with historical, artistic, and public health significance, through its activities in the field of visual health. We look forward to meeting a community passionate about art and history at our first exhibition, scheduled for summer 2024.