Opened with the inauguration of the Cultural Palace, on October 26, 1913, the art gallery meant an exhibition of predominantly Hungarian art, the most representative works coming from the custody offered by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. For March 20, 1927, the memory of the gallery space retains the first permanent insert of Romanian art. Italian, Flemish, French, Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian painting, pieces of furniture or tapestry, sculptures, entered into the collection after 1949, made it possible not only to arrange exhibitions on diachronic principles, depending on the alternation of styles, but also to perceive the artistic phenomenon of synchronic perspective. The art gallery operated in the same location – on the second floor, in the left side wing –, divided into a variable number of rooms according to the thematic organizations. In the spring of 1977, it was dismantled, art being replaced by the new concept developed by contemporary history: "Building the multilaterally developed socialist society".

The painting belonging to the Central European space, chronologically framed in the 19th century, returns, in May 2022, after a discontinuity of almost half a century, in the skylight rooms of the Cultural Palace. Definitive for the works selected from the European art collection, built up in more than a hundred years, is the influence of the important artistic centers (Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Paris), perceived through the aesthetics of the currents that succeeded one another or they coexisted: romanticism, academicism, realism.