On your right stands the City Art Museum, with its headquarters in the Esterházy Palace at number seventeen on King Street. From the outside, it plays the part of a noble baroque residence very convincingly... which is fair, because that is exactly what it was. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the Esterházy family gave this palace its present form: a city mansion wrapped around an inner courtyard and enclosed by three streets. Old aristocratic shell, new civic purpose. Győr is quite good at that trick.
Here’s the important part: this museum does not treat the past like a specimen pinned under glass. The city council founded it on the fifteenth of October, nineteen ninety-four as an independent art museum, and one of the people who pushed hardest for that was Kolozsvári Ernő, a mayor of Győr and a serious art collector. He understood that a historic center cannot live on façades alone. It needs fresh work, fresh arguments, fresh eyes. So instead of letting old buildings retire gracefully, Győr handed them second careers.
That idea runs through the whole institution. Its first home was the newly restored Magyar Ispita, where visitors first saw the collection of Doctor Péter Váczy. Then the museum grew into a network: five permanent exhibitions, a temporary exhibition space, a graphic workshop for printmakers and draft artists, and two artist houses. It organizes the Győr International Art Colony every year, the International Drawing and Graphic Biennale every two years - a biennale is simply a major exhibition held every other year - and a larger euroregional show every three years. In other words, this is not a quiet warehouse for respectable old paintings. It is a working machine.
Inside this palace, the star is the Radnai Collection, nearly one thousand works strong, spread through a building that looks two stories tall from outside but unfolds into four levels within. The collection focuses on modern Hungarian art from roughly nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty, with names that matter: Rippl-Rónai József, Egry József, Szőnyi István, Derkovits Gyula, Bernáth Aurél, Barcsay Jenő. Sculptors too: Medgyessy Ferenc, Borsos Miklós, Ferenczy Béni, Pátzay Pál. Not a bad guest list for one address.
One detail I like: when the Radnai Collection was reinstalled here, the museum gave special attention to works on paper - drawings, watercolors, and prints that had long lived in the shadow of the paintings and sculpture. A separate graphic cabinet now shows about seventy of them. Quiet works, maybe, but they prove a point. Renewal in Győr does not only mean adding something new; sometimes it means finally letting overlooked things speak.
And that spirit spills beyond this one building. The former ceremonial hall now hosts lectures, concerts, and artist talks. The museum also runs children’s programs, including the country’s first children’s museum, because apparently Győr decided culture should start early and keep going. Sensible policy.
As you continue toward King Street, the frame widens. The museum gives art a home, but the street ahead shows how a city itself can become a gallery of memory, ambition, and reinvention. If you want to come back inside later, the museum is generally open on weekdays from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, and closed on weekends.
