Distinguished international guests gathered Monday at the art gallery of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for the opening of an exhibition of 50 paintings, watercolors, and drawings by Istvan Farkas, a Hungarian modernist who was prominent in the Ecole de Paris during the interwar years.

“He began as an Expressionist, he developed a Cubist style in the mid- to late 1920s in Paris, and by the early 1930s he was painting the idiosyncratic pictures that constitute a majority of works in the exhibition,” the gallery curator, Diane Kelder, told the Knickerbocker.

She welcomed attendees such as the deputy secretary of the Ministry of Culture in Hungary, Erika Koncz; consul general of Hungary, Gabor Horvath; director of the Museum Kiscell in Budapest, Peter Fitz, and others. The president of the CUNY Graduate Center, William Kelly, offered greetings at the show, which runs through November 5.

Standing in front of one of his father’s haunting paintings, Charles Farkas told the Knickerbocker the exhibition was “one step toward letting people know about and appreciate my father’s work. Unfortunately, he was forgotten for a time in Hungary.”

After the Nazis murdered the painter in 1944, Farkas’s work was subsequently ignored under Hungarian communist rule. In effect “he was killed twice,” said a granddaughter of the painter, Alessandra Farkas, an American correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been increasing interest in and exposure for her grandfather’s work to a wider public. Exhibitions have taken place in Berlin in 1996, Rome in 2002, and this past March at the Budapest Historical Museum.

In the illustrated catalog accompanying the show, Ms. Kelder observes, “In his paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s, he depicted a mysterious world populated by alienated, ghostly figures and hostile objects which can be under stood as both meditations on the frailty of human existence and premonitions of his own death at Auschwitz.” Paintings such as “Memory of War” (1941) forebode future destruction while also recalling the painter’s prior service in the Austro-Hungarian army.

At the opening, author Francesca Slovin pointed out the artist’s “sensual use of colors.” In the catalog, Katalin Nagy states, “One is struck by Farkas’s ability to invest accessories and objects with an uncanny, even sinister vitality.”

With unsettling figures and bewitching objects that appear to have lives of their own, his paintings are not easily classifiable. Poet and historian Andre Salmon once aptly noted, “He comes from one school only: his own.”

The legacy of Istvan Farkas’s work is a link to future generations of artists and art historians. Mr. Farkas told the Knickerbocker that a program has begun to bring postgraduate students to spend time at his father’s villa and studio on Lake Balaton in Hungary.

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NOTES ON NABOKOV Entertaining anecdotes abounded at a panel convened Monday at Columbia University’s Miller Theater to discuss Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita” 50 years after its publication in Paris by Olympia Press.

Northwestern University emeritus English professor Alfred Appel Jr. recalled once having nothing to read and Nabokov handing him a couple of short story anthologies from his apartment in Montreux, Switzerland. Mr. Appel was amused to see that in these books Nabokov had graded the authors. Joyce received an A for a “Dubliners” story and Chekhov had also gotten an A; Hemingway’s “The Killers” received an A-, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” rated a C+; Thomas Mann got a C, and a D.H. Lawrence story garnered a D. Nabokov had given his own story an A.

Mr. Appel also recalled how much fun it was to be around Nabokov. Once in 1954 Mr. Appel sat two rows behind him at a ramshackle, ill-kept arts theater off the beaten path in Ithaca, N.Y. The Humphrey Bogart film “Beat the Devil,” directed by John Huston, was playing, and Nabokov was laughing at all kinds of moments when no one else was laughing, while Nabokov’s wife was shushing him. Then Nabokov burst with volcanic laughter at the point in the film when Peter Lorre comes upon actor Robert Morley getting his portrait painted outdoors. The portrait is in profile, and Lorre exclaims, “That doesn’t look like him. It only has one ear.” Soon, Mr. Appel recalled, there were two kinds of people in the theater, those laughing at the movie and those laughing at Nabokov laughing at the movie.

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WILSON CALLING Gotham Book Mart held a reception Monday celebrating Lewis Dabney’s “Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature”(Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Seen at the party were agent Rosalyn Targ and Michael Broomfield, who is completing a bibliography of John Updike for Oak Knoll Press.

Mr. Dabney told an anecdote showing just how nurturing of authors bookstores can be. Gotham Book Mart founder Frances Steloff one day received a call from Wilson, saying, “Can you send [writer John] Dos Passos $200? He’s going to lose his farm otherwise.” Steloff obliged.

gshapiro@nysun.com