Most Expensive Artworks Auctioned in Hungary in 2023

As an integral part of the international art market, the auction market for Hungarian artists shows similar dynamics: the market boomed in 2021, then started to slow down this year after strong results in 2022. The Hungarian contemporary art market, like the global art market, is showing a growing interest in works by female artists such as Ilona Keserü and Judit Reigl, according to mutargy.com, a Hungarian artworks portal that listed the highest-priced works sold at auction in Hungary in 2023. The three highest bids wera all made at the Kieselbach Gallery and Auction House in Budapest.

The highest price paid for an artwork in Hungary last year was HUF 220 million. For this amount, the highest bidder could take home the picture ‘Woman with a bird-cage’, painted in 1892 by József Rippl-Rónai and auctioned in December 2023.

The ‘Woman with a bird-cage’ is not only one of the most important works of Rippl-Rónai's Parisian period, but also one of the key pieces of his oeuvre, and one of the most famous masterpieces of the beginnings of Hungarian modernism. “If there is a Hungarian Mona Lisa, then it is the Hungarian icon with the mysterious smile, the ‘Woman with a bird-cage’. With her green cage, the dreamy, slender Art Nouveau figure has captured the hearts of millions of viewers at the Hungarian National Gallery's permanent exhibition,” the art portal says.

The second highest winning bid was HUF 180 million, paid for the paiting 'On the beach' by János Vaszary in May 2023.

Describing the picture painted around 1928, the art portal says that “the painter wove the structure of this complex composition, created over nine decades ago, into a unified whole with virtuoso solutions. The rhyming colors, the structural elements that connect the planes of space, such as the V-shape of the legs, the sweeping contours that surround the patches, and the interlocking gazes, such as the staring at each other of the lady in the cape and the man with his back to her, are deliberately used as painterly devices to make the myriad motifs, which seem to live separate lives, an integral part of the whole. Vaszary's work is the joyful painting of an artist who has mastered all the painterly tools and all the techniques of expression - an unending celebration of color and form.”

Third on this list – with HUF 170 million also paid at the December 2023 auction – is the ‘Park scene’ painted by Béla Czóbel’s in Nagybánya around 1906 at the age of 23 years.

The art portal notes that it is rare that the starting price of a painting is higher than the lifetime record of its author - as was the case with this painting. Although one of the most important works of early Hungarian modernism had previously been attributed to Czóbel, it is only in recent decades that research has clarified authorship of this picture. The oil painting started at HUF 120 million, but generated a much-higher-than-expected price.