La Collection Historique

Imre Pán (Budapest, 1904- Paris, 1972) was an art critic, exhibition maker and Kassák’s friend and intellectual partner. In 1924, he was editor of a dadaist magazine IS [Also] in Budapest. From the end of the 1920s, he contributed to Kassák’s magazines: Dokumentum [Document] and Munka [Work]. In 1945, he co-founded the “European School”, an artist group for non- figurative art. He ran a small bookshop called Művészbolt [Art Shop], where he regularly organised art exhibitions. During the post-war years, he and Kassák wrote The History of ‘-isms together.

Pán emigrated to Paris in 1957, where he organised exhibitions and edited the publications Signe [Sign] and Morphèmes [Morphemes], with original drawings. At the same time, he started his art collection La Collection Historique, focusing on works from the European Modernism of the 1920s. Just a few of the names represented in his collection: Sonia Delaunay, Max Ernst, Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky and Mikhail Larionov.