Koszta József Museum

The Koszta József Museum is the town museum and is housed in a former courthouse on the main square. The collection covers the prehistory and history of the Szentes region, with the usual rooms of Neolithic pottery, Sarmatian bronzes and folk costumes, but its strongest holding is the gallery of paintings by József Koszta and his Alföld School contemporaries.

The Koszta paintings alone are worth the visit — strong, dark, unsentimental scenes of peasant life on the plains, very different from the Hungarian work of the same period that you see in Budapest. The museum is small enough to do in an hour.

things to do museum
A story
József Koszta was one of the leading painters of the so-called Alföld School — a loose group of artists who, around 1900, set out to record the harsh light and labour of the Great Hungarian Plain instead of the polite landscapes of the academic tradition. Koszta lived and worked on a farm near Szentes for thirty years, and the museum holds the largest single collection of his work.