2725_8-5x11_Catalog_v8 3/28/07 4:16 PM Page 1

The Nancy G. Brinker Collection Works of Passion,

Interludes, and Progress

Hungarian Artists
2725_8-5x11_Catalog_v8 3/28/07 4:16 PM Page 2

Hungarian Artists
Hungarian Artists
The Nancy G. Brinker Collection Works of Passion,
Interludes, and Progress

Hungarian Artists
Edited by Éva Forgács
Cover: Inquiries:
László Fehér, Self-Portrait with www.nancybrinker.org
Staircase (2001)
© 2007
Consulting Editors: The Nancy G. Brinker Collection
Ann Hofstra Grogg
Robert Grogg

Graphic Design:
Beveridge Seay, Inc.

Offset Lithography:
Pretzelman Printing Group
Fairfax, Virginia

Paper:
Sappi McCoy Premium Gloss
This book is printed on
acid-free paper.

For the convenience of an

American audience, Hungarian
names are presented with
surname last. Diacriticals have
been preserved.

iv
Contents

vi Preface 7 Selections from the 42 László Moholy-Nagy

viii Dedication and
Acknowledgments
ix Susan G. Komen for the Cure
1 The Nancy G. Brinker
Collection
2 Éva Forgács
3 Steven Mansbach
4 István Rozsics
5 Michael Ennis
Nancy G. Brinker Collection
44 Lajos Vajda
8 Mihály Munkácsy
46 Dezső Korniss
10 Pál Szinyei Merse
50 Endre Bálint
12 János Vaszary
52 Lili Ország
14 Béla Kádár
56 László Lakner
16 Béla Czóbel
58 István Nádler
18 Béla Uitz
62 Károly Kelemen
20 Róbert Berény
64 László Fehér
24 Imre Szobotka
73 Artists Biographies
26 József Nemes-Lampérth
89 Contributors
30 Jenő Gábor

32 István Szőnyi

34 Vilmos Aba-Novák

38 André Kertész

v
Preface
My passion for Hungarian art began
at a tumultuous time — a few days
after September 11, 2001, when
I arrived in Budapest to serve our
country as the United States
Ambassador.
The shipping delays in the wake of
the September 11th attack made the
spectacular collection of twentieth-
century American women artists,
curated for me by the U.S.
Department of State Art in Embassies
Program, slow to arrive from
America. In the meantime, I asked
my friend, historian, and art
consultant István Rozsics, if some
contemporary artists in Budapest
would like to display their art in the
American Residence.
Soon works by László Fehér, István
Nádler, Károly Klimó, Imre Bak,
˝ among
Tamás Soós, and Attila Szucs,
others, were giving me constant
comfort. As I saw their paintings day
by day, I grew to appreciate the
richness and power of these works,
and their historic and emotional
qualities. I fervently wanted to know
more about them and became
passionately interested in learning
about Hungarian art generally. In
addition, the excellence of the Art in
Embassies Program inspired me to
want to carry on the tradition of
vi
cultural exchange as a way to
personalize a connection with
another country. With the help of
István and the expert auction house
owners to whom he introduced me,
I began my adventure of building
my own collection of modern
Hungarian art.
Despite Hungary’s stormy twentieth-
century history, its artistic tradition
has remained strong and consistent,
even experiencing revivals. Most
of the early Hungarian modernists
studied and exhibited in France and
Germany, some in the United States,
and some in Italy and Austria. Few
had access to international markets,
however, and few gained the
recognition they deserved for their
contribution, which was more valu-
able than generally acknowledged.
My explorations were rewarded by
an artistic tradition that is both
familiar and surprising, highly ener-
getic but not without melancholy,
an intriguing mix of well-known
idioms and idiosyncratic expression.
The modern artists of Hungary
often depict strong structures with
strong color but reveal, too, a poetic
sensibility and often a sense of
humor and complexity that are the
unmistakable hallmarks of Central
European art. Spanning the period
from the Austro-Hungarian Empire
to the present, my collection reflects
Hungary’s tumultuous past,
highlighting historic and, in some
cases, dire epochs. One of my
favorite works is János Vaszary’s
1905 portrait of Countess Ilona
Batthyány, a Hungarian woman,
born into the aristocracy, who
supported and celebrated the arts.
Vilmos Aba-Novák’s watercolor of
the New York skyline in 1935 is the
mirror image of my own journey,
as it shows America as seen through
the eyes of a Hungarian artist. Also
among my favorite artists are the
true early modernists of Hungary,
including Róbert Berény, Sándor
Bortnyik, Béla Czóbel, Farkas
Molnár, József Nemes-Lampérth,
Lajos Tihanyi, and Béla Uitz, and I
have a fondness for the representa-
tives of the Szentendre group, active
since the 1930s and named after
the village of their residence. These
include Lajos Vajda, Endre Bálint,
and the latter’s close friend Lili
Ország. Vajda died at the time of the
Holocaust, and although both Bálint
and Ország survived it, their art was
heavily marked by that experience.
I am particularly proud of having
such an artistically and historically
significant work as László
Moholy-Nagy’s early Self-Portrait
(1919), which occupies a place
in the international history of
modernism that many other
Hungarian artists deserve.

I have come a long way since my

first explorations. I am fortunate
to have had Richard Merkin’s
encouragement and support
throughout this odyssey. His help
has enhanced my collection,
enabling it to achieve both a
richness and a depth that I could
not have imagined. Although the
Nancy G. Brinker Collection is
still a work-in-progress, I am eager
to share my excitement about
these works and to give visibility
to modern Hungarian art, which
deserves so much more study I grew to appreciate the
and appreciation.
richness and power of these
Nancy G. Brinker works and their historic and
emotional qualities. I fervently
wanted to know more about
them and became passionately
interested in learning about
Hungarian art generally.

vii
Dedication
To my sister Susan G. Komen,
and to our parents Ellie and
Marvin Goodman, who
challenged us to repair the
world. To my colleagues from
Susan G. Komen for the Cure
who are meeting this challenge.
Nancy G. Brinker
viii
Acknowledgments
Any project of this size and
complexity that includes a
published catalogue and a traveling
exhibition could not have been
completed without the assistance
of a great many people. I am
grateful to all of you.
Very generous financial support
was provided by General Mills,
Charles Schwab, and Yoplait
Nancy G. Brinker
Susan G. Komen
for the Cure
Susan G. Komen for the Cure is
honored to be a part of Hungarian
Artists: Works of Passion, Interludes,
and Progress from the collection
of our founder, Nancy G. Brinker.
We deeply appreciate your support
of the exhibition and our work in
communities across the globe.
In 2007, Susan G. Komen for the
Cure will mark twenty-five years
in the fight against breast cancer.
What started as a promise between
Nancy and her dying sister, Susan G.
Komen, to end breast cancer has
become a global movement gaining
momentum each passing year as
more and more caring individuals join
in our promise.
The more than 100,000 breast
cancer survivors and activists are
the face and voice behind our vision
of a world without breast cancer
touching more than 18,000 U.S.
communities and many foreign
countries. Our Komen Race for the
Cure® Series is now the largest
series of five-kilometer runs/fitness
walks in the world with more than
1 million participants each year.
We have made it possible for
everyone to talk about breast cancer
— the treatments, the social impacts,
the solutions — on our website,
via our toll-free Helpline, at doctor’s
offices, on Capitol Hill, in political
summits, and among families.
We have worked tirelessly so that
every major scientific advance
to date in the fight against breast
cancer has been touched in some
way by a Komen grant.
In twenty-five short years, we have
achieved what was once thought
unachievable: we have begun to
change the world. But our work is
not finished. There are still women
without access to screening and
care. And there are still people
dying from the disease.
On this, our twenty-fifth
anniversary, we ask you to join
us as we move forward with a
renewed passion and energy to
achieve our original promise—
to end breast cancer forever.
ix
The Nancy G. Brinker Collection
represents a rich survey of the
achievements of the Hungarian culture
and presents to a world audience our
shared aesthetic heritage. The span
of styles, the range of references,
and the variety of media in the
Nancy G. Brinker Collection attest to
the expansiveness of Hungarian art,
both of the classical avant-garde era
and of contemporary times.

In this stimulating assembly of great

paintings and small masterpieces,
the Nancy G. Brinker Collection affords
a new vision of an art and a history
that belongs as much to us as it does
to Hungary.
 Éva Forgács
Throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, Hungarian artists
embraced the progressive idioms
of Western art, yet they never failed
to let their own history and culture
inform their work. The various
currents of modernism received
new emphases as they entered
Hungarian culture. The painters who
espoused these ideas represented
an outlook that was new: that of the
independent, autonomous artist who
is a world citizen and speaks the
international language of the fine arts
as the lingua franca of enlightened
thinking and vision. The Nancy G.
Brinker Collection focuses on such
treasures of Hungarian art, and, quite
uniquely among other Hungarian
collections, includes contemporary
art in Hungary as well.
The work of the living painters
in present-day Hungary is the
most eloquent proof of the energy
and singularity of Hungarian art.
2
Indebted to a long lineage of
high-quality artistic accomplishments
that are well documented in the
present show, contemporary art in
Hungary displays tart wit as well
as playfulness, craftiness, and
conceptualism. Nancy G. Brinker,
who was Ambassador of the
United States in Hungary, functions
now as Hungary’s cultural
ambassador to the United States.
She and her collection, which she
is developing and exhibiting, invite
the American public to explore
Hungarian painting, and through it,
a particular segment of Central
European life and history.
Steven Mansbach
Hungarian artists of the twentieth
century developed the styles and
defined the content of modernity
from Budapest to Berlin, Kecskemét
to Chicago. Legions of Hungarian
painters, designers, sculptors, and
architects brought the innovative —
and often revolutionary — aesthetics
they had first articulated in their
native land.
The Nancy G. Brinker Collection
extends and complements the
acknowledged masters of Hungarian
modernism — Róbert Berény,
Béla Uitz, Sándor Bortnyik — while
it introduces us to original artists
of more modest reputation.
The collection demonstrates the
dynamic qualities and variability of
modern art itself, while reflecting
the creative curiosity, open-minded
nature, and discriminating taste of
Ambassador Brinker.
With this collection, Nancy G. Brinker
has embarked on a process of
self-discovery and selfless cultural
advocacy. The artwork embodies
the collector’s uncurbed excitement
about the vital culture of modern
Hungary and its future, just as it
reflects an understanding of that
nation’s complex and often contradic-
tory past. Indeed, it is this very
history — one of accomplishment,
openness, innovation, and years of
constraint and tribulation — that
makes Hungary’s art compelling for
both a native and a world audience.
3
 István Rozsics
It all began on September 11, 2001,
the very day that newly confirmed
U.S. Ambassador to Hungary,
Nancy G. Brinker, had planned to
leave for her post in Budapest.
Though she was soon able to take
up her post, security concerns
delayed all kinds of shipping,
including the paintings supplied for
the Ambassador’s Residence by
the U.S. Department of State Art in
Embassies Program. The walls of the
ambassador’s residence, a historic
site in the hilly part of Budapest,
remained bare. Ambassador Brinker
had the idea that perhaps works
by Hungarian artists should be
showcased on these walls.
Many people, both Hungarians and
Americans, shrugged their shoulders,
saying that the task was complicated,
they did not have enough time, how
could one produce a museum-quality
collection of contemporary Hungarian
art in just a few days, and then
hang the paintings, too. Fortunately,
“No, this is not possible” is not in
Ambassador Brinker’s vocabulary.
Her positive approach came at
a crucial time. She offered, in
Sir Winston Churchill’s words, only
“blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” but
she got everyone working together
to create this collection to honor
the vision of artists and the culture
from which they had sprung. People
fell in love with Ambassador Brinker
and with what she was trying to do,
especially the painters.
4
Despite my knowledge and
experience, I have never had such
a challenging task. Ambassador
Brinker wanted to know everything.
She asked questions about the
Trianon Treaty, about the Nagybánya
Artists’ Colony, and Hungarian post-
impressionism. She wanted to know
about Károly Ferenczy and why his
paintings were so scarce. She asked
for the stories of his fantastic twins,
Naomi, the tapestry maker, and
Benjamin, the sculptor. Her questions
were profound, embarrassing, and
logical. She was not afraid to ask
them. Over long phone calls, feverish
internet communications, and
investigations of auction records,
she uncovered the secrets of the
art world. A new world was opening
up, for me as well.
This tour of the collection
throughout the United States and
later in Europe is the satisfying
and heartwarming result of years
of animated work.
Michael Ennis
When I met Ambassador Brinker
in the Fall of 2003, I was asked to
assist in the organization of a small
exhibition from her collection for a
museum near her home in Florida.
I knew very little about Hungary
and less still of Hungarian art. I was
immediately struck by quality and
range of the collection but also by
her depth of knowledge of each
work. Like a proud mother, she
would tell the history not just of
the painting, but the artist and the
period and what was happening in
Hungary at the time.
From this beginning, I have had the
privilege to see Ambassador Brinker’s
enthusiasm spread to each city we
bring the exhibition. I have witnessed
cancer survivors wait for hours to
attend an opening with the hope of
meeting Nancy Brinker in person.
I have listened while a woman told
me her story of survival as she
escaped Budapest and the emotional
homecoming this collection inspired
in her. Most Hungarians living in
the United States have no access
to museums or galleries exhibiting
Hungarian art. Hearing their stories,
seeing their faces as they recount
all they have had to endure and
witnessing their strong will to
survive had helped me to begin to
understand truly appreciate Hungary
and its people, and its art.
The Nancy G. Brinker Collection is
one of the largest private collections
of Hungarian art. It spans over 140
years of Hungarian history, and tells
a story like no other collection in the
world. With each painting, sculpture
and photograph we can see the
humanity of a country through the
eyes of a remarkable woman, herself
a survivor, who has been deeply
touched by her service there.
5
Selections from the
Nancy G. Brinker Collection
Mihály Munkácsy
1844 ‒ 1900
Mihály Munkácsy was largely
self-taught. In 1865, with help from
several patrons, he went to study in
Vienna and later in Munich where —
in contrast to the dominant traditions
of history painting — he produced
peasant genres. In 1867, he traveled
to Paris, where he was strongly
impressed by the work of Gustave
Courbet and the plein-air paintings of
the Barbizon School. Between 1868
and 1871, while continuing his
studies in Düsseldorf, he completed
his first large-scale genre painting,
The Convict (1869), which won the
Gold Medal of the Paris Salon in
1870. Encouraged by the unexpected
success, he moved to Paris in the fall
8
of 1871 and stayed there for the rest history. The white of the boy’s shirt
of his life. In 1874 he married the contrasts sharply with the deep black
widow of the baron de Marches. of the twilight landscape, suggesting
the tradition of the Dutch masters
After 1875 Munkácsy turned to as well as Courbet’s genre paintings
landscapes, in which the influence and the intense blacks of Édouard
of the Barbizon painters is evident. Manet’s work.
From 1881 on he painted dramatic
religious and historical subjects in Today Munkácsy’s work can be found
a highly dramatic style. He was also in museums in Vienna, Philadelphia,
highly successful with his paintings and Chicago, as well as in New York’s
representing the life of the rich Metropolitan Museum of Art.
in Paris.
Agnes Berecz
Tin Drum (1872), formerly in the Éva Forgács
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection,
draws on Munkácsy’s own childhood
memories and experiences of village
life. The barefoot young boy with
his drum and drumsticks evokes,
regardless of country or nation, the
child heroes of national liberation
movements throughout European
Mihály Munkácsy
Tin Drum
1872
Oil on panel

9
Pál Szinyei Merse
White Magnolia
1866
Oil on canvas

10
Pál Szinyei Merse
1845 ‒ 1920
A contemporary of the French
impressionists, Pál Szinyei Merse
introduced Hungary to painting
outdoors and using natural light. His
subject matter centered on casual
activities, for example, an alfresco
picnic. Like his French peers, he
was lambasted for challenging
academic traditions of sophisticated
composition and lighting. Unlike the
French impressionists, however,
Szinyei was a lone figure without
support,without colleagues as he
experimented with new approaches.
The authoritarian Hungarian
Academy’s rejection of his work
altered his career. He was expected
to pursue the somber tradition of
dark-toned, heavy, tragic historic
painting in which the careful
arrangement of figures and dramatic
lighting told the stories of the past
and of his nation.
Instead, Szinyei enjoyed painting for
what he understood it was: the
celebration of the pleasures of life,
and the beauty of nature with its
colors and shapes. He did not
represent figures in an artificially
constructed and calculated
environment but in plein air— that
is, outdoors, on the lawn or under
the trees, in sunshine or filtered light,
eschewing manipulation and drama.
Not only did he avoid historic
subjects and the pomposity often
attached to their representation, but
he painted what was held in utter
contempt by the Academy as the
idlest kind of painting: still lifes.
Szinyei’s White Magnolia (1866) is an
eloquent credo of the painter who
does not need big topics to create
a compelling picture. He painted it
during a short stay in Hungary while
he was studying in Munich, where all
his fellow Hungarian students — his
contemporaries — were working on
monumental historical compositions.
This still life — which appears more
like the fragment of a still life — is
exceptional even in Szinyei’s work.
There is no narrative whatsoever,
nothing literary, only the purely
visual: a simple composition, strong
draftsmanship, vivacious color, and
intimate light. Some art historians
have compared Szinyei’s paintings
from this period to similar work by
the young Édouard Manet or to
Gustave Courbet’s work. White
Magnolia exhibits evocative textures,
lights, and a sense of freshness that
are found in Manet’s work.
Éva Forgács
11
János Vaszary
1867 ‒ 1939
At a time when the art of painting
was held in increasingly high esteem,
János Vaszary may well have been
the most popular painter ever in
Hungary. He was recognized by
critics, collectors, and academics and
loved by an enthusiastic public. The
light touch of his brush left vivacious
colors on the canvas, exuding the joy
of life with pure visual pleasure.
Throughout his long career Vaszary
spent many years traveling and
working abroad. He studied in
Budapest, Munich, and Paris. His
virtuoso painting was rooted in
thorough knowledge of the elements
of painting. He began painting
outdoors and over the course of his
lifetime his career underwent several
artistic transformations. He created
works that could be classified as
art nouveau, impressionist, post-
impressionist, and fauve. His
signature whimsical images leave
12
lasting memories. His most mature
paintings evoke the simple eloquence
of Raoul Dufy and reveal some
influences from Japanese art.
There is richness in his paintings;
an abundance of color, beauty, and
elegance are conveyed by swift,
unfailingly compelling brushstrokes.
Portrait of Countess Ilona Batthyány
(1905) is an early, buoyantly impres-
sionist picture, a rare exception in
Vaszary’s work. Its explosive painterly
richness notwithstanding, it goes
beyond the purely visual. The model’s
personal life story is symbolic of
the complexity of Hungarian history.
She was the daughter of Gyula
Andrássy, prime minister of Hungary
after the 1867 Compromise with the
Habsburgs. She married Count Lajos
Batthyány, the grandson of Hungary’s
very first prime minister, who had
been executed by the Habsburgs in
1849 for his role in supporting the
move for Hungarian independence
from Austria and the Habsburgs.
Countess Batthyány was one of the
earliest philanthropists in Hungary.
She was a generous sponsor of
several charitable organizations sup-
porting women and underprivileged
children. Besides being a wealthy
socialite, she was also an art lover
and an eminent public figure.
Vaszary’s portrait depicts the
countess as a private, pensive
person, intimately capturing her
seated figure, yet conveying
her forceful character through the
striking directness of her gaze. The
diagonal of her dark, clothed figure
connects the bright and the dark
sides of the painting, pulling the
viewer’s gaze from colorful radiance
of the light to the increasing
shadows and darkness behind her,
offering the viewer an emotional
and aesthetic balance.
Agnes Berecz
Éva Forgács
János Vaszary
Portrait of
Countess Ilona Batthyány
1905
Oil on canvas

13
 Béla Kádár
Ladies in Front of
Green Background
1930s
Gouache on paper

14
Béla Kádár
1877 ‒ 1956
Béla Kádár’s work is in the process
of being reassessed in Hungary.
This versatile and prolific painter who
frequently changed styles has been
identified primarily with his art deco
period in the 1930s and 1940s. Along
with Hugó Scheiber and Armand
Schönberger, he is seen as the most
important Hungarian representative
of the movement.
But Kádár also had realist, art
nouveau, and symbolist periods,
and in the 1920s he was a radical
modernist. He was brought to the
attention of Herwarth Walden,
Berlin’s leading champion of modern
art, by no less an authority than Lajos
Kassák, the leader of the Hungarian
avant-garde. For a short period of
time Kádár lived in Berlin, the art
capital of interwar Europe. During
this time he had both a solo show in
Walden’s Der Sturm Gallery, the main
venue of international modernist
and avant-garde art, and he received
invitations to participate in a number
of group exhibitions. Kádár gained
international recognition in these
years and was selected, among
other interested galleries and
collectors, by the Société Anonyme,
whose organizers purchased
paintings from him. He participated
in the Société’s 1926 Brooklyn show
and got exposure to an American
audience as well.
Kádár painted pictures reminiscent
of Marc Chagall during the early
1920s. While these romanticized life
— Jewish and otherwise — in the
Hungarian countryside, he found
his real voice when he adopted art
deco in the early 1930s. This style
and the urban subject matters he
chose to depict resonated well with
Kádár’s most faithful audience —
the urban, moderately modernist,
educated upper middle classes.
Kádár has always been noted for
the skill, fluency, and charm in his
work. Although stylized, his work
was always accessible and enjoyed
by an audience in Hungary as well
as abroad.
Kádár’s representation of women
is mostly imbued by fantasies
suggestive of the female figures’
erotic involvement with one another.
Ladies in Front of Green Background
(1930s) is thoroughly informed by
cubism but uses the undulating,
easygoing, erotic lines of art deco.
It features exotic women pressed
closely together and covered by
thin veils only. The flatness of the
painting gives added emphasis to
the curving lines of the bodies
and the deliberately reductive
representation of the faces. Kádár
posits the women not so much in
reality as in erotic fantasy, which was
highly appreciated by his audience.
Éva Forgács
15
Béla Czóbel
1883 ‒ 1976
Throughout his long life, Béla Czóbel
had an exceptional standing among
Hungarian artists. He was a living
classic, a French and Hungarian
painter at the same time.
In the early 1900s Czóbel studied in
Munich, later at the Nagybánya (Baia
Mare, Romania) Artists’ Colony, and in
Paris. Nagybánya was the workshop
and artistic center for the Hungarian
impressionists (the plein-air painters)
and the generation known as
neo-impressionists. One of the
first painters to explore the highly
expressive and aesthetic value of
color, Czóbel was a leading post-
impressionist, returning from Paris to
Nagybánya in 1906 as a full-fledged
fauve painter who had exhibited with
Henri Matisse, André Derain, and
Maurice de Vlaminck at the 1905
Salon d’Automne.
Czóbel had his first one-man show in
Paris in 1907 and continued to have a
strong presence in both the Paris and
the Budapest art scene. In 1909 he
joined Károly Kernstok, Róbert
Berény, Dezső Czigány, Ödön Márffy,
16
Dezső Orbán, Bertalan Pór, and Lajos
Tihanyi in founding The Seekers, the
first modernist group in Hungary,
renamed The Eight in 1911.
During World War I, Czóbel lived and
worked in the Netherlands, and
exhibited in Amsterdam. While in
Berlin in the early 1920s he became
acquainted with the German
expressionists and clearly saw the
close resemblance between their
work and the short-lived French
fauvism. From 1925 he lived both
in Paris and Budapest. Until 1940 he
spent his summer vacations in the
baroque castle of his friend Baron
Ferenc Hatvany, an artist and
collector of international standing.
Czóbel chose Szentendre as his
second home when away from Paris.
Czóbel was a figurative painter but
never a realist. He used soft, deep
black contours and intense colors,
transforming his landscapes,
portraits, nudes, and still lifes into
stylized renditions of an inner
condition. He wavered between
expressionism and a reticent, poetic
post-impressionism. The figurative
motifs of his paintings function
as a screen with a multitude of
emotional and unconscious elements
behind them.
Reclining Girl (1930) is a simplified
rendering of a nude evoking, through
the figure’s childlike body and almost
apparent unawareness, not only the
early expressionists but even the
primitivists. The framed painting
in the background is a more
sophisticated reference connecting
the joy of art to the joy of life.
Czóbel pairs a warm red on the
right and a dense blue on the left,
positioning the fragile female body
as a bridge between the sensual
and the intellectual spheres. Through
this shimmering presence, he
achieves balance and serenity.
Czóbel has become the iconic figure
of idiosyncratic and moderate
modernism in Hungary. He absorbed
expressionism, fauvism, and even
cubism but applied them on his own
terms, focusing on the inner vision
emanating from the figures and
objects in his paintings.
Éva Forgács
Béla Czóbel
Reclining Girl
1930
Oil on canvas

17
 Béla Uitz
Sitting Woman
1918
Walnut stain,
India ink on paper

18
Béla Uitz
1887 ‒ 1972
Béla Uitz was a key figure in the
first generation of the Hungarian
avant-garde. Having studied at the
Hungarian Academy of Decorative
Arts, he transferred to the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts in 1908. His
friend the painter József Nemes-
Lampérth’s energetic, free, almost
gesturelike drawings had a decisive
impact on Uitz’s work. Uitz joined the
militant avant-garde circle of Lajos
Kassák, which was informed by the
Berlin-based socialist-anarchist forum
Die Aktion. He married one of
Kassák’s sisters in 1912, and the
frequent artistic and political debates
that he had had with his friend now
continued with his brother-in-law:
Uitz was more the militant
communist, while Kassák was more
the moderate social democrat.
During the 1919 Hungarian
Commune, Uitz was committed to
the idea of social equality. As director
of a proletarian art school he took an
active part in making art accessible to
all. The children in his school visited
museums, attended the opera, and
went on vacations, all for free.
Thus Uitz and the members of the
Commune realized the idea of a
new and just society. Besides his
teaching, Uitz also designed murals
and posters for the Commune, so
after the Commune’s defeat in
August 1919 he had no choice but
to leave the country. He stayed close
to Kassák during their exile in Vienna,
but traveled to Moscow in 1921 to
participate in the Comintern’s Third
Congress, that is, the international
organization of communist parties.
Returning from Moscow, he
visited Berlin, bringing firsthand
information about the new Russian
constructivism to the international
community of artists in Berlin.
Because of political differences
with Kassák, who was more of a
moderate social democrat that a
communist, Uitz quit the Ma (Today
Circle) in 1922 and launched the
communist journal Egység (Unity)
in Vienna as co-editor with the poet
Aladár Komját. After a two-year stay
in Paris, Uitz moved to Moscow in
1926, where he lived until his return
to Hungary in 1970.
Uitz was a radical artist who
considered it his moral duty to give
voice to the suffering and the
oppressed. During World War I he
represented the pain and tragedy
of the soldiers and their families
with pathos and compassion.
The strong emotional charge of his
works was expressed, however,
in equally strong structures: Uitz
systematically pursued the synthesis
of rational, constructive order, and
intense feeling.
Sitting Woman (1918) is a strong-
contoured, well-constructed, powerful
work of Uitz’s activist period as well
as an important document of the
Hungarian avant-garde. Although it is
ink on paper, it is—typically for Uitz—
a monumental composition. In its
dark-and-light contrasts and dynamic,
curved shapes, revolutionary fervor
blends with Renaissance dignity,
turning the mundane figure into a
colossal, symbolic woman, a working-
class Madonna.
Uitz’s significance was not lost on
his contemporaries. Many of his
works were instantly purchased by
collectors, and in 1915 he won the
Gold Medal at the International
Exhibition in San Francisco.
Progressive critics celebrated his
powerful visions in which, as Iván
Hevesy said, “The small and poor
seamstresses appear as monumental
as the goddesses painted by oriental
or medieval masters.”
Éva Forgács
19
Róbert Berény
1887 ‒ 1953
The most Cézannesque among the
young Hungarian modernists of the
1910s, Róbert Berény sought
structure and solidity in his early
paintings. He carefully constructed
his pictures and developed his
tectonic style early in his career, but
used color in a surprising, striking
manner that some of his critics
call “magic.”
20
Berény was only nineteen years
old when he attracted attention in
Paris as an emerging artist. He
participated in important exhibitions
and attended Gertrude Stein’s
Saturday night parties, where he
met Pablo Picasso and Henri
Matisse. In 1908 Maurice Denis
praised Berény for his excellent
draftsmanship in La Grande Revue.
Berény was apparently close to the
fauves and attended Matisse’s
school, 1907–08.
While in Paris, Berény was also in
touch with fellow Hungarian painters,
some of whom also joined the
group known as The Seekers in
Budapest, 1909. Berény was the
most experimental painter of the
group, using audacious color and
paying particular attention to the
spatial structure of painting. He was
noted for an element of logic, self-
irony, and intellectual construction in
his works. Indeed, he was educated
in philosophy and psychoanalysis
and was a trained musician and
composer as well as an artist.
Like many Hungarian artists Berény
had to leave the country after the fall
of the 1919 Commune in Hungary,
Róbert Berény
Still Life with Blue Pitcher
1911
Oil on canvas
laid down on cardboard

21
Róbert Berény
Still Life in Studio with
Pitcher and Fruits
1920s
Oil on cardboard

22
Róbert Berény
during which he had designed
the most effective political poster
for recruiting soldiers into the
Commune’s Red Army.
Still Life with Blue Pitcher (1911)
is a strong composition. There is
order and clarity in the triangular
arrangement of the circular fruit
bowl, the rounded apples, the erect
teapot, and the drapery. The
triangular shape is highlighted by
the sharp diagonal of the shadow.
The remarkably flattened picture
space surpasses Cézanne’s legacy,
pointing in the direction of cubism.
Still Life in Studio with Pitcher and
Fruits (1920s) reveals Berény’s new
interest in clearly defined, even
geometric, shapes and composition.
In his more decorative use of color it
also reflects the impact of advertising
design, in which Berény was very
successful after 1926. In this
painting he also goes further in
subverting and reinventing the rules
of one-point perspective.
Éva Forgács
23
Imre Szobotka
1890 ‒ 1961
Imre Szobotka is one of the
outstanding masters of the Hungarian
classic avant-garde. According to
many critics he is the only true
Hungarian cubist, though he added
a distinctive Hungarian element by
replacing the earth colors of the
French masters with a lively palette.
Upon settling in Paris in 1910,
Szobotka worked in an international
milieu. He studied at the Académie
de la Palette under the direction of
Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger.
Szobotka was strongly influenced by
the other cubists he met, such as
Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert
Delaunay, as well as the young
Russians Nadezhda Udaltzova and
Liubov Popova. He achieved recogni-
tion not only when he exhibited at
the Salon des Indépendants in 1913
and 1914 along with the leading
cubist painters, but Guillaume
Apollinaire also cited him as one of
the strongest presences in his review
of the Salon in the journal Montjoie.
24
Szobotka’s dynamic early career was
interrupted by World War I. Along
with enemy aliens he was interned in
Bretagne (Brittany) for four years. He
continued to work in isolation but had
difficulties getting paint and canvas,
so he had to be content with making
drawings and sketches.
Back in Hungary in 1919, Szobotka
sought to combine the particular
Hungarian tradition of post-impres-
sionism and cubism he had absorbed
in France. He had somewhat
softened his cubist vocabulary and
developed a more classical visual
language. His pictures feature a
warm, intimate atmosphere as well
as strong structure. He was among
the first Hungarian painters to
represent metropolitan Budapest in
his paintings as an environment as
natural as any landscape. He was
recognized as one of the best artists
both by the art critics and the
Budapest artist community. Szobotka
regularly exhibited his works and
took an active part in shaping the
art life of his city when in 1920 he
helped organize KÚT (New Society
of Artists).
Still Life on Table Top (1913–14) is
one of the strongest pictures from
Szobotka’s cubist period. It is lively
with warm, full colors. Although
it is fragmented and the objects are
broken down into abstract shapes,
Szobotka retains the balance
between the geometric elements
and the sensual, full-bodied shape
of the jug. In his 1925 survey New
Painting in Hungary the art critic
Ernst (Ernő) Kállai characterized
Hungarian modernism as having
a preference for the idiom he
termed “structured naturalism,”
rather than abstraction. Szobotka’s
cubist paintings are eloquent proof
of this statement, since these
compositions, no matter how
analytical, always retain a strong
sense of figurative rendition.
Éva Forgács
Imre Szobotka
Still Life on Table Top
1913–14
Oil on canvas

25
József Nemes-Lampérth
Street on Gellért Hill
1916
Oil on canvas

26
József Nemes-Lampérth
1891 ‒ 1924
József Nemes-Lampérth was one the
most original talents of the Hungarian
avant-garde, or, according to many
critics, the most talented painter.
He was an impulsive, anxious person
who was often been compared to
Vincent van Gogh. Painting for him
was a necessity; he had no choice
in the matter. In retrospect, his
powerful forms, bold colors, and
the flashes of white lights and
shimmering reds in his paintings
foreshadowed his ultimate tragedy.
Nemes-Lampérth lived at a time
when being a painter was held in
high esteem in the vibrant intellectual
life of Budapest. Georg Lukács,
Károly (later Charles de) Tolnay,
Leo Popper, Michael Polányi, Arnold
Hauser, and other members of the
society called the Sunday Circle, a
gathering of intellectuals, were proud
of the nascent Hungarian modernist
art, as they were of the poet Endre
Ady and the composer Béla Bartók.
Nemes-Lampérth traveled to Paris
in 1913 to see modern painting
firsthand. He worked in Paris,
painting and learning, until he was
drafted into the Austro-Hungarian
army upon the outbreak of
World War I. He was discharged
in 1915 after being wounded.
Besides visits to the Sunday Circle,
Nemes-Lampérth also joined Lajos
Kassák’s avant-garde group in 1917.
The director and leading curators of
the Budapest Museum of Fine Arts
also thought highly of him and
purchased many of his paintings.
Nemes-Lampérth had his first
episode of self-destruction in 1916.
He recovered and continued to work,
making 1916 and 1917 among his
most prolific years, during which
he painted a series of nudes and
landscapes in a romantic, poor
neighborhood of Budapest, the
later-destroyed Tabán. Street on
Gellért Hill (1916) is one of the best
27
 József Nemes-Lampérth
pictures of that period, with its strong
contours, expressive colors, and a
simple, monumental composition.
Between his ever more frequent
fits of manic depression, Nemes-
Lampérth made trips to Kolozsvár
(Cluj, Romania) to visit his sister.
The ink drawings he made there
are among the most striking pieces
not only of his oeuvre but also of
Hungarian art. The expressive power
of the dark tones and the flashes of
white and red render these drawings
dramatic and even fearful: the painter
takes his viewers to the brink of the
abyss he is standing on. The ink
drawing Kolozsvár (1920) is one of
the glaring examples of his anxiety,
which, at this time, Nemes-Lampérth
was still able to control.
During the 1919 Commune,
Nemes-Lampérth was a teacher at
the Proletarian Art Studio. Upon the
defeat of the Commune, he traveled
28
to Vienna and Berlin, where he lived
in poverty but was able to make
dramatic ink drawings of stunning
intensity. In the fall of 1920 he
exhibited in Berlin along with László
Moholy-Nagy, Walter Dexel, and
others, whereupon a Swedish art
collector invited him to his castle
near Stockholm so he could work
free of financial problems.
Nemes-Lampérth had great plans
and ambition, but his mental health
broke down. He returned to Hungary
and remained in a mental hospital
until his untimely death in 1924.
Agnes Berecz
Éva Forgács
József Nemes-Lampérth
Kolozsvár
1920
Black and colored
India ink on paper

29
 Jenő Gábor
Circus
1929
Oil on canvas

30
Jeno˝ Gábor
1893 ‒ 1968
Jenő Gábor was a native of Pécs, in
southern Hungary, a cultural center
with a great number of artists.
Seven artists from Pécs alone
enrolled in the Bauhaus in the early
1920s, a record in the history of the
school for students from one location.
Gábor began to paint actively in the
late 1910s. Following the standards
and the ideals of the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts, he was, as
a young artist, inspired first of all
by the great art of classical antiquity
and the Renaissance artists such
as Luca Signorelli and masters such
as Leonardo and Michelangelo.
His ideal was classical perfection as
demonstrated by the human body
and its movements and gestures.
He belonged to those Hungarian
artists who, particularly throughout
the late 1920s and the 1930s, aspired
to visualize an imaginary, yet ideal,
world they called Arcadia. The
compositions created to this end
often feature monumental, static
figures in formal poses, as if they
have been sculpted. Gábor’s early
work, particularly his nudes, shows
a great similarity to the paintings
of Károly Patkó. The quiet balance
and harmony of many of his
pictures show the influence of his
contemporary István Szőnyi and the
society of artists he belonged to,
the Gresham Circle.
Circus (1929) coincides with the
waning influence of the avant-garde
and the emergence of the new
objectivity in the mid- and late-1920s.
Clowns, harlequins, and pulcinellas
were the frequent subject matter of
the imaginary world conjured up by
many artists in the interwar years in
order to escape from a reality that
was growing increasingly dark and
menacing. The atmosphere—but not
the style — of Gábor’s composition
evokes the work of earlier painters —
those of pre–World War I German
expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner and Emil Nolde, for whom
the world of the circus and side
shows is pervaded by anxiety and
sinister anticipation.
Gábor’s contemporary parallels
in style as well as subject matter
were Francis-Marie Picabia and the
Alexander Rodchenko of the 1930s,
who foreshadowed the authoritative
styles of the coming decades.
Gábor’s work is currently being
rediscovered in Hungary. His
importance as an artist and
a teacher, whose students included
such great masters of the avant-
garde as Tihamér Gyarmathy, is
fully acknowledged.
Éva Forgács
31
István Szonyi
˝
1894 ‒ 1960
Szőnyi’s figurative painting appears
to fit seamlessly into the Hungarian
post-impressionist tradition of
landscape painting but in fact his
work defies schools, traditions, and
easy categorizing. Although he was
member of several societies and
groups of painters and was
unfailingly recognized as one of the
greatest artists of his generation,
Szőnyi is one of the lone masters of
Hungarian painting. His sensitivities
differed from those of most of his
contemporaries. Although he painted
in a realistic style, he was taken by
the atmospheric effects, the interplay
of light on the landscape and
structures, and the metaphysical
rather than the strictly precise
rendering of the objects. He was
constantly fascinated by the beauty
of the Danube’s curve, the reflection
of the light on the river’s surface, the
hazy tones of the sunshine across
the clouds. A puddle in the road or
the detail of a fence also captured
his attention.
32
In the early 1920s Szőnyi became
the leading figure of an informal
group of painters including, among
others, Vilmos Aba-Novák, Erzsébet
Korb, and Károly Patkó. Although
they never formulated a program
or exhibited together as a group,
critics called them the Szőnyi Circle.
They painted timeless idyllic
compositions of nudes, idealized
landscapes, and sculpture-like
self-portraits in a generic renaissance
and classicist tradition.
Szőnyi, however, moved away from
neo-classicism. His growing interest
in the landscape and the people of
Zebegény, the village where he lived
from 1924 on, created a painterly
oeuvre pervaded by a harmony
achieved in a totally different manner
from many of his contemporaries
who sought to express their vision
in either geometric abstraction or the
imaginary realm of an Arcadia. Szőnyi
found his answers in the reality of
nature, the simple life of villagers,
and the small details of country
life. After his early expressive and
neo-classicist periods he developed
a meditative painting characterized
by soft hues and spiritual vision
conveyed by the motifs of Zebegény
that he felt he could never exhaust.
In the 1930s he was, together with
Aurél Bernáth, Róbert Berény, Pál
Pátzay, and many others, a member
of the Gresham Circle, a society of
artists named after the café where
they had their regular meetings.
They considered the legacy of Szinyei
Merse — representational painting
filtered through memory — the
starting point of their own art and
sought to create timeless, idealized,
figurative painting. The group
steadfastly refrained from politics.
They were supported by liberal
upper-middle-class sponsors and
represented a quiet, oppositional
stance in interwar Hungary, a country
rapidly shifting to the political right.
They came out as an outspoken
political opposition only during
World War II.
Villagers (1932) is one of Szőnyi’s
finest works. A balanced composition
of a group of Zebegény men and
women, old and young, engaged
in the quiet ritual of the evening
gathering, it is an inherently
monumental masterpiece of pastel
hues, divided and connected figures
and color fields, stylized rendering,
and timeless quiet.
Éva Forgács
István Szőnyi
Villagers
1932
Oil on canvas

33
Vilmos Aba-Novák
Trattoria
1929
Oil on canvas

34
Vilmos Aba-Novák
1894 ‒ 1941
Vilmos Aba-Novák was one of the
most successful members of the
post–World War I generation of
Hungarian painters. He is considered
as one of the most significant
representatives of the Rome School,
a group of state-supported neo-
classicist Hungarian artists who had
been awarded scholarships to reside,
study, and work for a year or two at
the Hungarian Academy in Rome.
The program was established to allow
young, Catholic Hungarian artists to
absorb the contemporaneous Italian
novecento style rather than have
them be exposed to contemporary
French and German art.
Aba-Novák was among the first
recipients of this stipend. He spent
the years 1928–31 in Rome, along
with painters István Szőnyi, Károly
Patkó, Pál Molnár C., and the sculptor
Pál Pátzay. Like other grantees,
he not only accepted the new
classicism but also studied Roman
and Byzantine antiquity as well as
the monumental murals of the great
trecento and quattrocento masters
in Rome.
One of Aba-Novák’s recurring
topics was the world of the circus,
the artificial microcosm that so
spectacularly differed from the
ordinariness of everyday life. The
Pierrots, harlequins, and other circus
figures had not only had a long
history in Western painting but
were also rediscovered by many
painters who had been futurists or
representatives of other pre–World
War I avant-garde trends and were
now reconsidering their approaches
to their art. The circus epitomized
the longed-for mysterious, different,
exalted, poetic, and even dangerous
world possessed of its own specific
rituals. Aba-Novák kept his desire for
this world within the boundaries of
classical forms and compositions.
He painted many pictures about the
world of the circus that are clearly
counterparts to the Arcadia paintings
of his contemporaries. The circus,
with all its characters, dramatic
35
 Vilmos Aba-Novák
moments, and imaginary events,
is also the realm of fantasy in which
the painter indulges in spectacular
colors and compositional bravura.
Aba-Novák’s articulate neo-classic
style imposed form and discipline
onto the nostalgia inherent in his
circus scenes.
While in Rome, Aba-Novák wandered
over the city and was particularly
attracted to the many small, popular
restaurants of the Trastevere where
local people felt comfortable. Building
on the many sketches he had made,
Trattoria (1929) is an eloquent painting
of a tavern crowded with passionate,
gesticulating, somewhat grotesque
guests and musicians. Beside his
paintings of village fairs, the circus,
and Roman taverns, Aba-Novák was
commissioned to paint murals in
important churches and monuments
in Hungary between 1932 and 1938.
36
In 1935 Aba-Novák visited
New York City and painted a few
watercolors there, including the one
in the Nancy G. Brinker Collection,
which he may have meant to use
as sketches for future paintings.
New York (1935), even as a sketch,
reveals the Hungarian visitor’s
impressions and fascination with
the vertical dimensions and
triumphant industrialism of the
metropolis. It stands out in the
neo-classicist oeuvre as a picture of
real, fresh visual experience rather
than imagination.
Éva Forgács
Vilmos Aba-Novák
New York
1935
Watercolor on paper

37
 André Kertész
Untitled
ca. 1923
Vintage gelatin silver
contact print

38
André Kertész
1894 ‒ 1985
Perhaps the best known of the artists
in the Nancy G. Brinker Collection,
André Kertész is seldom thought
of as Hungarian, as his best-known
work was accomplished after his
departure from his homeland.
Like so many of his contemporaries
who lived and grew up in Budapest,
Kertész was fascinated by rural
Hungarian culture. Frequent trips to
the Ethnographic Museum as well
as to relatives in the countryside
fueled his interest. By the age of
twelve Kertész was already taking
photographs; yet even at this young
age, the characteristics of his mature
work — simplicity of subject matter
and the sense of the dramatic in
ordinary scenes — was already
evident, along with his astute talent
for clear composition.
At the age of eighteen, Kertész
went to work at the Budapest Stock
Exchange, where he stayed until the
start of the World War I. During the
war, he served in the infantry and
was wounded. Kertész brought his
camera with him and recorded the
nonmilitary side of life: his comrades
in moments of leisure and repose,
as well as the devastating effects
of the war on the countryside.
These photographs, some of
which were published in Hungarian
newspapers and journals, show
the same simplicity that informed
his earlier pictures.
At the end of World War I, Kertész
returned to Budapest and to
photography. The two images in
the Brinker Collection date from
this period. The photographs, taken
at a floating swimming pool on the
Danube, tied up on the Pest side
of the city, just south of the Elisabeth
Bridge, appear, at first, to be almost
amateur images of a person, possibly
a friend of Kertész’s, diving into the
pool. These photographs, though, are
anything but spontaneous. Carefully
composed, they are the images of
an artistically and technically adept
photographer. The two compositions
are similar: the strong static horizontal
of the pool building roof contrasting
with the dynamic diagonals of the
bridge cables just behind or, in the
case of the one image, the railing of
the steps into the pool. This similarity
is one of the first clues that these
photographs are improvised, though
whether Kertész waited until
someone dove, or asked a friend
to help is not certain.
Kértesz shot the images at a
relatively high speed, eliminating the
blurriness of the motion, but he also
used a broad depth of field, so that
almost everything in the images —
such as the Gellért Memorial or
the Greek Orthodox Church in the
background — is clear. These two
factors combine to contribute to the
sense that these photographs are
more a witnessing of the event than
a photographic record. Since our
eyes automatically adjust the depth
39
 André Kertész
of field and shift focus on slowly
moving objects, the photographs,
through careful manipulation of the
camera, almost exactly reproduce
what we would see.
In 1925, Kertész moved to Paris.
With the purchase of a hand-held
Leica camera, he was free to move
from the studio to the street— a
return, in many ways, to his earlier
Hungarian work. The richness and
striking juxtapositions of Parisian
street life attracted him. Now his
images speak of a sense of alienation
from an increasingly mechanized
life that is removed from nature and
natural rhythms. Kertész expressed
this experience through mirrors,
distortions, and the use of nudes in
contorted positions.
40
The rise of Nazism flooded France
with refugee German photographers.
In 1936 Kertész left Paris for New
York City. First working as a free-
lancer for fashion magazines as well
as exhibiting his work in museum
shows, he joined Condé Nast
publications in 1947. Increasingly
he received more and more favorable
notices from art critics and even
ventured into color photography.
By the 1960s he had become a living
classic, exhibiting his work worldwide
and honored with prestigious awards.
He revisited and photographed
Hungary several times. He died in
New York City in 1985. A eulogy was
delivered by art critic Hilton Kramer.
André Kertész
Untitled
ca. 1923
Vintage gelatin silver
contact print

41
 László Moholy-Nagy
Self-Portrait
1919
Watercolor

42
László Moholy-Nagy
1895 ‒ 1946
One of the emblematic figures of
the international modernism of the
1920s, László Moholy-Nagy was a
versatile and prolific artist. He was
a faculty member of the Bauhaus,
first in Weimar, later moving to
Dessau with the institution. He was
the founder of the New Bauhaus
in Chicago. He was a painter,
photographer, kinetic artist, designer,
stage designer, typographer, teacher,
and author who also experimented
with film.
Born in a small village in southern
Hungary — he adopted the name
of the farm-town Mohol where
he spent most of his childhood —
Moholy-Nagy served on the front
in World War I and started to draw
and paint on the postcards he was
allowed to send back home. A self-
taught artist, he became interested
in the radical Hungarian avant-garde
when he was discharged. As an
idealist, he was enthusiastic about
the social promises of the Hungarian
Commune in 1919. After its defeat he
went to Berlin. His one-man show at
Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm Gallery
in early 1923 changed his life: Walter
Gropius, director of the Bauhaus,
was impressed with his work and
vision and invited him to be the
youngest Bauhaus Master in the
same year. Moholy-Nagy taught the
famous Preliminary Course of the
Bauhaus. He counted among his
colleagues at that time Paul Klee,
Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar
Schlemmer, and others.
Moholy-Nagy was committed to
the artistic and social utopias of
international constructivism while
in Berlin and the Bauhaus. He soon
became a central figure of the
international avant-garde. He
participated in meetings and debates
with Theo van Doesburg, El Lissitzky,
Raoul Hausmann, and others. He
published the Book of New Artists
(1922) with the then-exiled leader
of the Hungarian avant-garde, Lajos
Kassák, in Vienna.
Lucia Schultz, who was soon to
become Moholy-Nagy’s wife, taught
him to use the camera, and Moholy
became one of the most innovative
photo artists of the early twentieth
century. But in true Bauhaus spirit he
was interested in and fascinated by
every new medium and all the
possibilities that the new technologies
offered the artist. Film, photograms,
and “telephone pictures,” opened
up new worlds. His kinetic work,
architectural designs, typography,
and writings, as well as his serving
as editor of the Bauhaus Books
series, made him internationally
acclaimed. When the idea of the
continuation of the Bauhaus in the
United States was considered in
1937, Gropius suggested Moholy-
Nagy as its founder and director.
Since Moholy-Nagy was very young
when he left Hungary, precious few
of his works remained behind in his
homeland. Self-Portrait (1919), part
of a mostly black-and-white series
of drawings he made in 1919–20,
is the most outstanding and
best-preserved piece among those
works. He seems to be informed
by the politically committed and
uncompromising expressionist art
of painters like Oskar Kokoschka.
Unwaveringly sincere, he puts all the
power of expression into the line
work. A vibrant linearity pervades the
picture, resulting in a web of tense,
rhythmical, expressive lines. He has
also managed to give the viewer a
psychologically profound and astute
image of himself as a keen, curious,
anxiously attentive, and confident
young man.
Éva Forgács
43
Lajos Vajda
1908 ‒ 1941
Lajos Vajda died at the age of thirty-
three in the midst of World War II.
In the years since his death, his
painterly and graphic oeuvre has
become known beyond the
boundaries of the art world and has
been embraced by the wider public
in Hungary. Today he is recognized
as one of the greatest and most
radically innovative artists of modern
Hungarian art.
Vajda started to draw and paint as
a child, and as a young man he
attended the Hungarian Academy of
Fine Arts. He was eager to join the
Hungarian avant-garde led by Lajos
Kassák, but he lacked the artistic
and ideological discipline that the
group’s leader required. So he, too,
along with his friends Dezső Korniss,
György Kepes, and Sándor Tranuner
left Budapest. He went to Paris,
where he studied with Fernand
Léger, and encountered not only
cubism and surrealism but also
Russian constructivism. Film,
photography, and collage impressed
him as the new media and were the
inspiration for his subsequent graphic
work and the photomontages in
which themes of human cataclysms
44
are explored. Brutality, suffering, and
the masses as prey to charismatic
leaders are the subjects of his
montage works.
Vajda returned to Hungary in 1934.
With his friend, painter Dezső
Korniss, he followed the example
of Béla Bartók, who had collected
folk music motifs. Together they
embarked on an ambitious program
to systematically collect the
decorative motifs of Hungarian
peasant art with the intention of
exploring the deeper, mythological
origins. They drew and copied
ornaments in the village of
Szigetmonostor as the first chapter
of a project that aimed to create a
visual vocabulary of the traditional
arts in the Central Europe.
In his compositions Vajda used
Hungarian, Serbian, and Jewish
calligraphy and motifs such as tin
crucifixes, old houses, gravestones,
fences, and tools juxtaposed or
layered, thus synthesizing
surrealism and constructivism in
a unique way. His perspective took
a comprehensive view of the pre-
historic, ancient, and early Christian
cultures as well as Judaism and
European modernism. His simple,
clear lines, articulate drawings, and
multilayered compositions guide
the viewer from the concrete object
to more complicated compositions
that double as powerful visions.
Most objects in Vajda’s paintings
have a concrete presence as well
as a symbolic meaning, allowing the
image to have a cultural-historical
dimension. The shape of the
Orthodox Christian icon, which is,
in geometric terms, a circle,
haunts many of his paintings as a
sacred, definitive, yet communal
form lingering behind particular
individual portraits.
Vajda’s most striking works are the
surrealist-abstract charcoal drawings
evoking monsters. These were made
in the last years of his life when
anxiety for his own life and for the
fate of the world drove him to
express nightmarish, infernal visions.
Abstract Composition (1928) reflects
Vajda’s interest in constructivist
geometry as well as the influence
of the art of Paul Klee. At the time
he painted it, his outlook on the
world was still serene, and he was
able to create a work that we see
as a balanced still life.
Éva Forgács
Lajos Vajda
Abstract Composition
1928
Charcoal on paper

45
 Dezső Korniss
Flute Player
1950
Oil on canvas

46
Dezso˝ Korniss
1908 ‒ 1984
Throughout his long career Dezső
Korniss combined the avant-garde
attitude of constructivism, reminis-
cences of figurative representation,
cubist formal analysis, symbolic
expression, and the dreamy language
of surrealism. Already a maverick
as a student, Korniss joined Lajos
Kassák’s socialist Munka Kör (Work
Circle) in 1930 along with Lajos Vajda,
future MIT professor György Kepes,
future film set designer Sándor
Trauner, and others, who formed the
Society of New Progressive Artists.
In spite of their leftist political
views and strong sense of social
responsibility and social justice,
the group was too idiosyncratic to
accept Kassák’s discipline. Since
the rest of the Hungarian art scene
was even more hostile to them,
the young painters and artists had
little choice but to go abroad.
Korniss went to Paris, where, besides
surrealism and abstraction, he found
himself fascinated by the tradition
of balanced Mediterranean composi-
tions. He began experimenting
with strong contours and simple,
articulate, stylized figurative motifs.
Upon his return to Hungary in 1931
Korniss supported the Group of
Socialist Artists. He spent long hours
researching the materials in the
Budapest Museum of Ethnography.
In search of a modern Hungarian art
rooted both in ancient tradition and
in contemporary Western modernism.
He cooperated with Lajos Vajda in
systematically exploring and collect-
ing the vocabulary of Hungarian folk
art in Szentendre and Szigetmonostor
during the late 1930s.
In 1945 Korniss was a founding
member of the European School,
a loose society of Hungarian
artists formed in the aftermath
of World War II with the goal of
modernizing the language of
Hungarian art. Between 1945 and
1950 he painted clearly composed,
figurative pictures at Szentendre
using local architectural motifs and
typical ornaments as well as forms
taken from prehistoric folk art.
He blended constructivist discipline
with surrealist dreaminess. In 1945
he also began work on a series
47
 Dezso˝ Korniss
of several hundred prints entitled
Illuminations, inspired by the poetry
of Arthur Rimbaud.
During the 1950s Korniss renewed
his interest in collage, experimented
with animation film, and also worked
on smaller painterly compositions.
The latter are complex as well as
monumental in spite of their actual
dimension. Flute Player (1950),
for example, echoes the work of
Édouard Manet and Joan Miró on
similar topics, as well as Lajos Vajda’s
Szentendre paintings and Hungarian
folk figures painted on ceramic jars.
The clear construct of a house and
the stylized flutist are framed by a
window that opens up the space
of the picture not only to the blue
sky but also to a large field of
associations. The reductive image
of a musician balancing the sun and
the moon on his mustache evokes
the serenity of timeless antiquity,
triumphant joy, and playful creativity.
48
Korniss had an interest in the
reduction of his favorite motifs
into abstract compositions.
Big Red Composition (1950s)
is evocative of stylized figures
whose details originate from the
architectural details such as the
balustrades and windowsills of his
beloved Szentendre houses and
from folk carvings.
Typically for Korniss, the geometric
house motif of the painting doubles
as the rational framework of a free,
cosmic, musical, human world of
folkloric tradition, ancient melodies,
and free imagination. The constant
combination of formal discipline and
unruly playfulness are Korniss’s
signature feature. He has left a legacy
in Hungarian painting from which
generations of artists and viewers
have benefited.
Éva Forgács
Dezső Korniss
Big Red Composition
1950s
Distemper on paper

49
Endre Bálint
1914 ‒ 1986
Endre Bálint’s ability to create
atmosphere and intonations that
are poignant and ironic are the
quintessential features of what is
called the Szentendre School in
Hungarian art. A sleepy
Mediterranean-like town a mere
dozen kilometers north of Budapest,
Szentendre attracted artists through-
out the 1930s and early 1940s
with its picturesque views and
inexpensive housing. It is a small,
densely built town perched on a
hilltop sloping down to the Danube,
with narrow curving streets,
Endre Bálint
Continuation I
1963
Oil on panel
50
a Serbian Orthodox church, small
baroque Catholic churches, and
a quiet, somewhat melancholy
atmosphere. Its distinct local
character as well as its closeness to
Budapest made it an artists’ colony.
Many Szentendre motifs, such as
single story, pitch-roofed houses,
decorated window frames, and
ancient ornaments, along with the
poetic mood of the town, appear in
the paintings of Lajos Vajda, Dezső
Korniss, Endre Bálint, and others.
Bálint learned from János Vaszary
and Vilmos Aba-Novák, but his
friendship with Lajos Vajda had
a decisive impact on his art.
With a sensitivity akin to that of Vajda
he was attracted by the symbolism
of simple objects. Shapes of a horse,
a cart wheel, or women enveloped
in head-scarves are to be found
in his paintings, evoking childhood
memories as well as the sense
of transience.
In 1945, when Bálint painted in the
neo-impressionist style, he was one
of the founding members of the
post–World War II association of
Hungarian artists, the European
School. This group set out to
legitimize surrealism and abstraction
in Hungarian art based on the legacy
of Lajos Vajda and Imre Ámos, who
had died in the Holocaust, and to
integrate Hungarian art into the
European narrative. In their 1945
Manifesto they declared that the
future belonged not to a Western
European or an Eastern European
art, but to the synthesis of both.
They believed in a united culture of
the European continent and were
committed to champion its new,
unified artistic language.
Bálint encountered surrealism when
he visited Paris in 1947 and visited
the Exposition Internationale du
Surréalisme in Paris. His paintings
from the late 1940s and early 1950s
show the strong impact of the
surrealist imagination and method,
which he combined, starting in
the mid-1950s, with the strong
symbolism he encountered in
Vajda’s drawings. Bálint also made
multilayered drawings and paintings
in which the clearly contoured forms
see through one another. Soon
he began making photomontages
in which his humor and self-irony
were at their best. A next step was
combining montage-building
with painting.
Eager to utilize what he saw as the
basic features of the small, rural
town, Bálint often used pieces of raw
wood as his canvas to incorporate
the shape and rustic texture
as dynamic elements that were as
much a part of the work of art as the
painting. Having created his personal
vocabulary, he often reduced his
usual motifs to fragments, creating
images of a veiled, shadowy world
halfway between memory and
reality. Continuation I (1963), painted
on a long, narrow wooden panel, is a
fine example, and indeed a synthesis
of Bálint’s Szentendre motifs, his
surrealist method, and his signature
dreamy atmosphere.
Éva Forgács
51
Lili Ország
In Front of Wall
1955
Oil on canvas

52
Lili Ország
1926 ‒ 1978
Lili Ország’s oeuvre is a unique
treasure in Hungarian painting.
She is the strongest representative
of surrealism in Hungarian art; this
idiom was her response to the
unspeakable horrors she had
undergone and witnessed during
the Holocaust. She had been in
the ghetto at her native Ungvár
(Uzhhorod, Ukraine) and imprisoned
in a brick factory. Only at the
last minute was she saved from
deportation to Auschwitz. She hid
in Budapest, using false documents,
until the end of the war. When she
became the student of István Szőnyi
and Róbert Berény at the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts, she felt
compelled to abandon the serene
colors and balanced compositions
they taught her because she found
them superficial and shallow in
the light of the humiliation and
persecution she had suffered only a
few years earlier. She was seeking
personal imagery adequate to give
full expression to the horror she had
experienced and the historic vision
she had developed.
Around 1950 she found the central,
austere object that was able to
express her anxiety, and it became
the quintessential image in her early
surrealist work from the 1950s: the
wall. As in her painting In Front of
Wall (1955), in which she represents
herself as a little girl in her Sunday
best in front of a grim, forbidding red
brick wall that dwarfs her, she used
the wall and the shallow space it
envelops as a rich motif to express
infinite ramifications of meaning. The
image evokes the impenetrable wall,
actual and imaginary, that surrounded
her no matter which way she turned.
The wall also represents the finality,
cruelty, exclusion, and imprisonment
that had threatened her. The clock on
the wall reminds the viewer of the
inexorable march of time, ticking
away before the catastrophe hits.
Ország often talked about her deadly
fear of being walled in, a fear that
continued to haunt her. Visualizing
the wall was, for her, an attempt to
break away from that recurring night-
mare. In many of her paintings high
walls enclose a labyrinth with a lone
figure captive within, blindly trying to
feel her way out. Ország did her best
to come to terms with the power of
systematic cruelty over the individual
that she had experienced but did not
and could not comprehend.
Dry Stalk (1952) epitomizes Ország’s
desperate isolation, articulated much
like Caspar David Friedrich’s Lone
Tree (1822). As Mannequins (1955)
indicates, Ország recognized Giorgio
de Chirico as a painter with whom
she felt an affinity. Unlike Chirico’s
wooden constructs, however,
Ország’s mannequins are headless
figurines dressed up in a dreamy
way for a never-to-happen ball,
isolated from the world of the living
by a screen toward which a living,
matronly woman walks. The
mannequins are wooden but
look fleshy, arrested in timeless
expectation, lending the picture an
air of surreality. Many of Ország’s
works, particularly her collages,
evoke the surrealism of Max Ernst.
In her lyrical intonations she may
be closest to the Czech surrealist
female artist, her contemporary,
Toyen (Marie Cerminova).
After 1956 Ország abandoned the
wall motif and the surrealist idiom,
yet she reinterpreted the wall in her
monumental series of paintings
representing ancient Hebrew letters
on crumbling stone walls. In the
eternal survival of the messages
encoded in the letters she found a
symbolical hole in the wall that
opened it up for new and different
meanings. Her subsequent series
of paintings in which she replaced
letters with integrated circuits show
a shift in emphasis entirely to the
code, the sign system that she
used as a cipher to bridge the
chasm between different generations
of different time periods assaulted
by history.
In Front of Wall, Dry Stalk, and
Mannequins are eloquent
representatives of Ország’s early
surrealist period, and, as such,
precious rarities.
Éva Forgács
53
Lili Ország

Lili Ország
Mannequins
1955
Oil on canvas

54
Lili Ország
Dry Stalk
1952
Oil on canvas

55
László Lakner
“Secrets”:
My Tied-Up Poems
1970
Oil on canvas

56
László Lakner
1936 ‒
László Lakner was the first
post-1956 painter in Hungary who
radically reinterpreted realism by
perfecting it. He turned it into a kind
of exalted photo-realism in the early
1960s, which almost preceded
American photo-naturalism, or was
at least contemporaneous with its
beginnings. Lakner’s ideas, however,
originated not from fascination with
the photographic verisimilitude of
the oil painting and the subliminally
routine patterns of photo shots,
but his repugnance with socialist
realism. He chose to be absolutely
accurate, enlarge his motifs, and
reveal the tiny details of texture in
order to demonstrate a truthfulness
different from the officially pro-
claimed “truth.” In a free combination
of representational precision and
idiosyncratic thinking, he achieved a
particular blend of the real and the
surreal that was appropriately
labeled “surnatural” in Hungarian
“art talk” of the 1960s. His magnified
renderings of a rope, a rose, and
human lips challenged the sense
of the real by their straightforward
explicitness and matter-of-fact
representation.
Lakner was the first to introduce and
interpret pop art in the Hungarian
context, using banal mass culture
products such as advertisements
and images from illustrated maga-
zines. Robert Rauschenberg’s works,
which he saw at the 1964 Venice
Biennale, inspired many of his
painted montage compositions. He
incorporated press photos, political
posters, and details from Rembrandt
paintings in his works. His particular
admiration for Rembrandt accounted
for his updating some of Rembrandt’s
motifs and methods and recontextu-
alizing them in 1960s Hungary.
Lakner was among the first
realist painters to exploit truthful
representation in order to ridicule
socialist realism by presenting its
favorite subject material — such as
the Bolshevik revolution, socialist
brigades, and others — in a mock-
serious, ironic manner, inspiring the
early work of László Fehér, who
considers Lakner one of the most
important sources of his inspiration.
Around 1970 Lakner started to paint
book and text pictures, a motif that
dominated his work for about a
decade. His fascination with the
written word led him to represent
handwriting in oil on canvas, while
he also created conceptual objects
using actual books. The graphic,
visual value of writing led him to
paint the enlarged handwriting of
artists and poets who intrigued him,
such as Paul Celan, Chaim Soutine,
Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel
Duchamp, and others. He also
painted books tightly tied with a
rope so they hide their contents —
which, he suggests, would remain
concealed anyway. The first of this
series of paintings represented a
volume by philosopher Georg Lukács,
tied with and hanging from a rope.
“Secrets”: My Tied-Up Poems (1970)
is one work in this remarkable series
that includes the visual representa-
tion of books by philosophers and
theorists, negotiating the territorial
and theoretical gaps between the
artist and the theorist.
Éva Forgács
57
István Nádler
1938 ‒
István Nádler belongs to the great
generation of the Hungarian
neo-avant-garde, coming of age as
artists in the early 1960s. Nádler’s
early work was impulsive and
colorful, but he soon became one
of the iconic figures of geometric
abstraction. This was the main
idiom of the historical Hungarian
avant-garde of the 1920s, the leading
figures of which, Lajos Kassák and
Sándor Bortnyik, were still active
and influential for most of the 1960s.
58
The formal discipline that Nádler
imposed onto his painting entailed
an ethical continuity and solidarity
with the suppressed currents of
Hungarian art that were inherently
internationalist and progressive in
outlook. Nádler’s work was more
nuanced than most representatives
of this trend. When, in the late
1960s, he developed his blossom
motifs, it was a somewhat rounded,
geometric vocabulary evocative of
Hungarian folk art and decorative
motifs in reference to a genuine,
nonmanipulated and nonmanipulative
artistic legacy. He posited this
approach as being at least as
progressive as the internationalism
of the avant-garde of the 1920s.
Nádler was one of the participants
of the legendary 1968 Budapest
exhibition named, after its venue
in an architectural planning office,
Iparterv, the first striking survey of
the new, post-1956, art in Hungary.
But Nádler is not a political artist.
His work incessantly negotiates
the emotive, personal element
in the framework of the universal
laws of geometry and infinity. In the
mid-1980s he painted a great series
István Nádler
2001 No.1
2001
Oil on canvas

59
 István Nádler

István Nádler
2001 No.2
2001
Oil on canvas

60
based on Kazimir Malevich’s Yellow
Square (1917–18) representing a
square shape shown in steep
foreshortening as it is turned into the
depth of space so that it reads as a
triangle. But it is, more importantly,
a liberated form of geometric
origin, at once one form and yet
again something else, filled with
dancing brush strokes, musicality,
rhythm, and emotional impact. This
series spelled the end of Nádler’s
hard-edge period, and his subse-
quent work has been intensely
musical, colorful, and lively textured
brushwork. Nádler has been studying
the conflict of the gesture and the
perfect form, examining rectangles
and triangles exposed to impulsive
lines, spontaneous motions,
and colors.
In two compositions, 2001 No. 1
(2001) and 2001 No. 2 (2001), Nádler
has conveyed the poetic beauty of
the juxtaposition of two clearly
defined colors and the parallel
strokes the brush leaves in the act
of applying pigment to the canvas.
The textured blue background, a hue
reminiscent of the Yves Klein blue,
superimposed by a black rectangle
is yet overwritten by the shiny
horizontal strokes of black matter.
These gestures-against-the-rule
paintings exude the solemnity of
harmony attained when form, color,
gesture, matter, and light are
brought into balance.
Éva Forgács
61
Károly Kelemen
1948 ‒
Károly Kelemen has been an
important player in several different
art movements — first in the
Hungarian neo-avant-garde of the
1970s and later in the postmodern
current of the 1980s called New
Sensibility in Hungary.
Kelemen’s late 1970s erasure
pictures hit the Budapest art scene
with a fury. Unlike the totally erased
Willem de Kooning picture, Kelemen
used erasure as an added motif, so
that he multiplied both the meaning
and the physical layers of the
pictures. Photo-portraits of Marcel
Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Jackson
Pollock, László Moholy-Nagy, and
works of other iconic masters of
the avant-garde were overlaid with
sweeping gestures of eraser-work
that removed parts of the original
drawing. Partly appropriation art,
partly passionate negation, the
construction and the deconstruction
of the image were inseparable in
Kelemen’s new body of work.
Kelemen paid tribute to the classics
of twentieth century—modernity
and its myths—when portraying
them in the hyper-realist style. But
at the same time he vehemently
negated them by taking out parts of
the portraits with his soft eraser.
These pictures are drawn on canvas
62
with graphite, which lends them
another touch of classicism. “The
myth as ready-made,” to use his own
words, is Kelemen’s subject. He uses
the original images as ready-mades
and proves them to be something
else with a Magritte-like “this is not
a pipe” treatment. He makes a
perfect graphite drawing that he
“overwrites” with gestures of
erasure. The viewer then gets the
sum of these actions as a new,
third image. The formula is the same
as that of the collage in Sergei
Eisenstein’s definition: 1 + 1 = 3.
Kelemen belonged to the group
of young artists — students or new
graduates — who gathered in the
Rózsa presszó (Rose Cafe),
organizing performances and
exhibitions from about March
1975 on. He was one of the
neo-figuratives who reconsidered
artistic representation.
Kelemen, as he often stated, was
taken not so much with the
philosophy as with the material and
technical aspects of his works.
One of the central figures of the
post-Iparterv generation, a group of
young abstract and conceptual artists
who first showed their work in
1968, he continued to use quotations
and references, and indeed, he
appropriated other elements into
his paintings throughout the 1980s.
For example, he deliberately blended
the cubist Pablo Picasso with the
pre-cubist one and added his own
childhood teddy bear in his painting
Ironing Bear or Life Is Hard (1985),
a paraphrase of Picasso’s Ironing
Woman (1904) in which the woman
is replaced by a huge toy bear
painted in cubist style but highly
colored. He continued to challenge
the icons of the classic avant-garde,
for example combining Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)
and Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire
(1902–04), and he used works of
classical antiquity and images of
playing cards as ready-mades as well.
Tallow-Dream (2000) is one if the
finest pieces of Kelemen’s work.
Here he evokes the legend of the
German artist Josef Beuys, who
was said to have been saved by
Crimean Tartars after his plane
crashed during World War II.
The Tartars, he said, wrapped him in
fat and felt to keep him warm, and
these two materials became Beuys’s
recurring topics in memory of this
self-mythologized event.
In his signature mix of nostalgia
and irony, theoretical inquiry and
craftsmanship, emotional charge
and humor, appropriation and
originality, Kelemen presents a new
expressivity and a reassessment
of the recent past.
Éva Forgács
Károly Kelemen
Tallow-Dream
2000
Graphite,
lacquer on canvas

63
László Fehér
Brigade Excursion
(Genre Paintings II)
1979
Oil on fiberboard

64
László Fehér
1953 ‒
László Fehér burst into the art
scene when, after a few minor
presentations, he had his first solo
show at Műcsarnok (Hall of the Arts),
one of the most important venues
of contemporary art in Budapest,
in 1988.
Reminiscent of photo-naturalism
but reductive and highly personal,
Fehér’s paintings exploited not just
photography but also the particular
vulnerability and accidental character
of family snapshots. He used old
photographs representing sites of
city life, family outings, himself as
a child, his parents, or other groups,
such as socialist brigades. Brigade
Excursions (1979) captures one
of these groups on an outing.
These brigades were factory teams
organized following the Soviet
model, obliged to be upbeat about
work and to maintain the spirit of
cooperation and working morale in
Communist Hungary.
Born in the year— in fact, the
month— of Joseph Stalin’s death,
Fehér matured in the era of a some-
what benign dictatorship under the
leadership of János Kádár. Fehér’s
early paintings exude the hidden
emotions, silent dissent, and
suppressed desires of people living
under totalitarian rule. His photo-
naturalist paintings differ from the
American pieces of the same style
and time in their political awareness
and meaning. They blend compassion
and sarcastic criticism. During the
years when Fehér was coming of
age as an artist, realism was the
dictum, so he offered realism, but
with a twist. Instead of mandatory
optimism, Fehér’s early photo-
naturalist paintings exhibit the
inconvenient truth of poverty, decay,
and provincialism, but also with an
eye for the grotesque. In addition
to his Hungarian predecessors
László Lakner and László Méhes,
this period of his painting brings to
mind Ilya Kabakov’s mock-socialist-
realist works that sympathize with
the vulnerable small person who
seeks happiness and fulfillment
under circumstances that would not
warrant either.
Breaking another taboo, Fehér
also used Jewish themes and the
memory of the Holocaust in images
that were metaphoric as well as
photo-realist. One of the outstanding
works of this period is Diaspora
(1982), the photo-naturalist
representation of a piece of matzo
broken into pieces.
Radically limiting his palette in the
mid-1980s, he evoked the childhood
photographs taken from his family
album in paintings reduced to black
and white and tones of gray. Some
are purple and yellow, others are
black and yellow with shadowy,
transparent figures, painted as mere
contours, passing through them.
He omits most of the details of the
original photograph, leaving only
the basics of the environment
serving as the background for his
transparent figures. Fehér achieved
a filmlike effect in this way, giving
the impression that the figures,
rendered as outlines, the likes of
which we see in Smoking Man
(1998) and Black Vase (1998) have
only a transitory presence. The
enigma of photography, as the
representation of present and past
65
 László Fehér
at the same time, turn these very
literal paintings into metaphors, as
the transient figures seem to walk
through life itself, not simply the
actual scene.
Consistent with the concept of
transience Fehér has used the motif
of stairs throughout his career. The
mystery of moving from unknown
depth to unknown height returns in
his Self-Portrait with Staircase (2001)
a synthesis of the abstract and the
photographically real. Here Fehér
uses an unusual vantage point,
showing the white figure of a man
humbly climbing the white stairs in
the abstract space of blackness,
opening up a mystical dimension
within the style of photo-realism.
In his series of portraits, which
include one of Ambassador Nancy G.
Brinker (2004), philosopher Ágnes
66
Heller, and others, Fehér has
created an impressive portrait gallery
of personalities who have made an
impact on the time in which they live.
Although he has frequently changed
the basic color or the style in his
paintings as he continues his
explorations, Fehér has developed
a consistent body of work. One
of the most prolific artists of his
generation, he has produced a
powerful oeuvre that is uniquely
individual in motifs and intonation,
even as it evokes the deeper and
darker collective experience.
László Fehér
Black Vase
1998
Oil on canvas

67
 László Fehér

László Fehér
Smoking Man
1998
Pastel on paper

68
László Fehér
Self Portrait with Staircase
2001
Acrylic on canvas

69
 László Fehér

László Fehér
Portrait of Nancy Brinker
2004
Oil on canvas

70
Artists Biographies
 Vilmos Aba-Novák
Born Budapest March 15, 1894;
died Budapest September 29, 1941.
Vilmos Aba-Novák enrolled in the
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in
1912 to train to be an art teacher.
After he had served in World War I
he studied printmaking with Viktor
Olgyai. He had his first solo show
at the Ernst Museum in 1922.
Beginning in 1928 he worked in
Rome for three years, having been
awarded the prestigious Rome
stipend by the Hungarian government,
and became an emblematic
representative of the neo-classicist
Rome School, the Hungarian version
of the novecento style. He had
successful shows in Budapest as
well as Milan and sold many of
his paintings to Italian collectors.
In 1935 he visited the United States
and spent a few months in New York
City. Upon his return to Hungary
he accepted many ecclesiastic
commissions, some of them large
murals. He was successful abroad,
too: he won the Grand Prix at the
1936 Paris World Fair. From 1939 on
he was a professor at the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts and was one
of the officially supported artists
and a celebrated mural painter of
interwar Hungary. Since his death,
several retrospective exhibitions of
his works have been organized in
Budapest, Warsaw, Prague, Kosice,
and elsewhere.
74
Endre Bálint
Born Budapest October 14, 1914;
died Budapest May 3, 1986.
Bálint was son of the well-known
journalist and literary critic, Aladár
Bálint. He studied advertising design
at the Budapest School of Decorative
Arts, 1930–34. After that he studied
at the private painting school of
János Vaszary and Vilmos Aba-Novák.
From 1936 on he spent several
summers at Szentendre and
befriended Lajos Vajda, who had a
major impact on his painting. In
1945 he was one of the founding
members of the European School,
an artists’ society uniting most of
the Hungarian artists in the wake
of World War II into a program of
grafting progressive tendencies like
surrealism, constructivism, and
abstraction onto Hungarian art and
integrating Hungarian art into the
European narrative of progressive
art. He traveled to Paris in 1947
and was influenced by the surrealist
exhibition at the Galerie Meaght,
which influenced his subsequent
paintings and photomontages.
He left Hungary after the 1956
revolution. Between 1957 and 1961
he lived in Paris. In 1958 Édition
Labergerie published the Jerusalem
Bible with more than one thousand
illustrations by Bálint. The 1960s
was Bálint’s most prolific period.
He exhibited widely in Hungary and
Europe, and besides his painterly
work he published several volumes
of poetry and his memoirs.
Róbert Berény
Born Budapest March 18, 1887;
died Budapest September 10, 1953.
Róbert Berény was a self-taught
artist who took classes irregularly
before his first trip to Paris in 1905.
He studied at the Académie Julian for
a mere three months, and exhibited
four of his paintings at the 1906
Salon d’Automne in Paris. The
following year he showed six works
at the Salon des Indépendants, in
which he participated in 1908 as
well. Upon his return to Budapest
he represented a blend of colorism
and Cézannesque structure. In 1909
he joined the Károly Kernstok-led
modernist group The Seekers
(renamed The Eight in 1911) and
participated in the group’s exhibitions.
During the Hungarian Commune in
1919 he designed the famous poster
that called people to arms in the
defense of the Commune. He had
to emigrate after the defeat of the
Commune, and lived in Berlin until
the general amnesty in 1926. He
could not find work while in Berlin,
but composed musical pieces and
wrote concert reviews. Upon his
return to Hungary he was not only
appreciated as a painter but also as
a graphic designer. His commercial
posters were very popular. In 1948
he was appointed professor at the
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in
Budapest, and he received several
state prizes and awards.
Béla Czóbel
Born Budapest September 4, 1883;
died Budapest January 29, 1976.
Béla Czóbel began studying painting
with the Hungarian artist Béla Iványi-
Grünwald in the summer of 1902,
then studied at the Munich Academy
of Fine Arts, and at the Académie
Julian in Paris with Jean-Paul
Laurens. He exhibited as early as
1903 at both the Salon de Champs-
de-Mars in Paris and the Nemzeti
Szalon in Budapest. In Paris he
befriended Henri Matisse, André
Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Pablo
Picasso, Georges Braque, Amedeo
Modigliani, and many other artists.
In 1905 he exhibited at the landmark
Salon d’Automne along with the
fauves and became the leading
artist among the Hungarian post-
impressionists working at the
Nagybánya Artists’ Colony in
northeastern Hungary (Baia Mare,
Romania). He had his first one-man
show at the Galerie Berthe Weil in
Paris in 1907. He continued to work
in Hungary, spent his summers
at Károly Kernstok’s house at
Nyergesújfalu, and was co-founder
with him of the group The Seekers
in 1909. Between 1914 and 1919
Czóbel lived in the Netherlands,
then moved to Berlin, where he
contacted the members of the former
Die Brücke, and joined the Freie
Sezession. In 1925 he moved to
75

Paris and had a retrospective
exhibition at the Galerie Bing in
1930. Meanwhile he was active in
organizing the KÚT (New Society
of Artists) in Hungary, had several
retrospectives shows in his native
city, and was awarded the most
prestigious prizes. He participated
in the Venice Biennale for the first
time in 1934, exhibited in New York
in 1927, and in 1936 at the Gallery
Brummer. He went to Szentendre
in 1939, and after World War II
he spent the summers there and
the winters in Paris. In 1945 he
joined the European School, a society
of progressive Hungarian artists,
and exhibited with the group as well
as at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts,
Katia Granoff, Galerie Drouet, and
Galerie Zak in Paris, the Galerie Moos
at Geneva, and leading Budapest
venues. Czóbel’s paintings are in
many public and private collections
all over the world. He was recognized
in Hungary by several high state
awards and prizes.
76
László Fehér
Born Székesfehérvár March 17, 1953.
Fehér studied at the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts between
1971 and 1976 with Lajos Szentiványi
and Ignác Kokas. His early photo-
naturalist paintings singled him out
not only as a great talent but also
as a new voice, both lyrical and
documentary. He found his signature
reductive, symbolic, photo-based
realist style in the mid-1980s. He
was the first artist after World War II
to break the taboo of Jewish subject
matter and the Holocaust in
Hungarian painting. Fehér rapidly
rose to international recognition.
He participated in a great number
of exhibitions and has had numerous
solo shows worldwide. In Hungary
he was recognized with the Kossuth
Prize in 2000. The many other prizes
he has won include the MAOE
Professional Prize at the Fifth
National Pastel Biennale, and the
Prize for Hungarian Jewish Culture,
2003. Fehér lives in Budapest and
Tác, Hungary.
Jeno˝ Gábor
Born Pécs May 23, 1893;
died Pécs September 1, 1968.
Jenő Gábor studied at the Budapest
Academy of Fine Arts with Tivadar
Zemplényi. From 1919 on he worked
as an art teacher in his native town,
then, in the 1940s he lived in Szeged
in southern Hungary.
In 1926 and 1937 he made trips
to Paris and in 1931 to Berlin. He
had solo exhibitions at the Nemzeti
Szalon in Budapest in 1939, in the
Ernst Museum in 1959, and a major
retrospective show in Pécs in 1971.
Béla Kádár
Born Budapest June 14, 1877;
died Budapest January 22, 1956.
Béla Kádár traveled to Paris and
Munich in 1896, and upon his return
to Budapest enrolled in the
Mintarajziskola (Pattern Drawing
School) that was noted for its high
professional standards. He won a
scholarship in 1911, exhibited his
work in 1921 in Budapest, then
traveled to Berlin. He had a solo
exhibition in Der Sturm Gallery and
participated at a number of group
shows there. His works were
included in the Société Anonyme’s
1926 International Exhibition of
Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
In 1928 he traveled to the United
States as one of the Der Sturm
Gallery’s artists.He was member
of progressive societies of artists in
Hungary such as KÚT (New Society
of Artists), and UME (Association
of New Artists). He adopted his
signature decorative style in the early
1930s and had much recognition and
a wide audience. In the 1950s he
returned to realism and used socialist
themes as subject matter.
77
 Károly Kelemen
Born Győr 1948.
Károly Kelemen attended the
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts
in Budapest, 1970–74. Beginning
in 1975 he participated in the Rózsa
(Rose) group (named after the café
where they regularly met). In 1982
he opened the Rabinec Gallery
(later renamed the Rabinext Gallery)
in his own studio in Budapest’s
Falk Miksa Street, which became
a meeting point and the site of
activity for young artists in the city.
In 1994 he was awarded a stipend
to attend the Hungarian Academy
in Rome. Two years later he was
the guest of Yoko Ono and Samuel
Havadtőy in the Ono-Lennon Studio
in New York City. In 1998 he was
artist in residence at the Villa Romana
in Florence. Kelemen lives in
Szentendre near Budapest.
78
André Kertész
Born Budapest July 2,1894;
died New York City,
September 28, 1985.
André Kertész is known as one of
the pioneers of modern photography.
Even though he had worked at the
Budapest Stock Exchange and
served in the Austro-Hungarian
army during World War I, his camera
was always at hand. In 1925 he
left Hungary for Paris to pursue
photography and changed his birth
name of Andor to André. In 1936
alarmed by the escalating tensions
within Europe, Kertész left for the
United States. For almost thirty
years he worked for the Condé Nast
publishing firm, doing fashion and
architectural photography. Only in
the 1960s and in his retirement
did he return to the world of fine
art photography that was his first
love. A solo show at the Museum
of Modern Art shortly afterward
reestablished his position and
reputation. Kertész is considered
a classic in modern photography.
Dezso˝ Korniss
Born Beszterce [Bistrija, Romania]
December 1, 1908;
died Budapest August 17, 1984.
Dezső Korniss studied painting and
drawing 1921–22 in the private
school of Artúr Podolini-Volkman. At
fifteen he traveled to the Netherlands,
where he was profoundly impressed
with the work of Johannes Vermeer,
Frans Hals, and Piet Mondrian.
He became the student of István
Csók and János Vaszary at the
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts
between 1925 and 1929. In 1930
he was a founding member of the
Society of New Progressive Artists
in Budapest; in 1930–1931 he joined
the Munka Kör (Work Circle) led by
the leader of the Hungarian avant-
garde Lajos Kassák. From 1929 on
he was member of KÚT (New
Society of Artists) as well as the
Society of Szentendre Painters. In
1930 he traveled to France and the
Netherlands. Later he worked with
his friend Lajos Vajda at Szentendre
and Szigetmonostor, collecting and
organizing motifs of folk ornaments.
Having served in World War II and
been a prisoner of war, he joined the
European School in Budapest, 1945,
and was a leading member of the
group. In 1947–48 he was professor
of the Hungarian Academy of
Decorative Arts. Dismissed in 1948,
he supported himself by coloring
puppets and creating commercial
posters. Between 1963 and 1969
he worked in the Pannonia Film
Studio in Budapest, which specialized
in animation. In 1958 he had a
one-man show in the Netherlands
that was followed by retrospectives
in Hungary at Székesfehérvár,
Hatvan, Szentendre, and Budapest.
Korniss has had a major impact on
younger generations of artists and
was invited to participate in many
of their exhibitions.
79
 László Lakner
Born Budapest April 15, 1936.
László Lakner studied at the
Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts
with the much respected Aurél
Bernáth, whose students carried on
and creatively altered his artistic
legacy. Lakner has participated in
exhibitions since 1958 in Hungary
and abroad. His many study trips
took him to Italy, Austria, and
Germany. He was awarded many
grants, and in 1976 he won the
Paula Modersohn-Becker Prize and
settled in Germany. In 1977 he won
the Prize of German Art Critics, in
1979 he was invited to teach at the
University of Essen, in 1979–80 he
taught in the Art History Department
of the University of Berlin. In 1980–81
he was awarded a grant by the
P.S.1 Foundation of the Museum
of Modern Art and spent the year
in New York City. Since 1982 he has
been a professor at the University
of Essen. In 1999 he was awarded
with the Kossuth Prize in his
native Hungary. He has had major
exhibitions in leading European art
museums. Lakner lives in Essen
and Berlin.
80
László Moholy-Nagy
Born Bácsborsód July 20, 1895;
died Chicago November 24, 1946.
László Moholy-Nagy went to
school at Szeged, the industrial
and intellectual center of southern
Hungary. He started to write poetry
and published a few poems in local
journals in 1913. He moved to
Budapest in the same year, began
to study law, but was drafted in
1916. He started to draw as a
soldier. He was wounded, was taken
care of a military hospital in Odessa,
then returned to Budapest, where
he exhibited some of his work.
During the 1919 Hungarian Commune
he signed the Manifesto of the
Hungarian Activists, so he had reason
to fear retaliation after the defeat
of the Commune. He joined the
Hungarian activists in Vienna, later
settling in Berlin. In 1923 Walter
Gropius invited him to join the faculty
of the Bauhaus, where Moholy-Nagy
taught various courses until 1928.
He met his first wife Lucia Schultz
in Berlin in 1920. She taught him
photography; it became one of
the most important media for
Moholy-Nagy. Between 1926 and
1928, he was editor and designer

of the Bauhaus Books series as well
as the Bauhaus Journal, published
Painting, Photography, Film (1925),
From Material to Architecture (1927),
and contributed to the Bauhaus
Stage (1924). He participated in the
dynamic German art life as artist,
teacher, stage designer, and author
of many articles. In 1929 he shot his
first film Marseille, an Old Harbour,
followed by Black-White-Gray (1932),
and Metropolitan Gypsies (1932). He
met his second wife Sybille Pietzsch;
they were married in 1933. From
Nazi Germany they fled to the
Netherlands, then in 1935 to England,
where he worked as a set designer
with Alexander Korda and published
three photo albums. In 1937
Walter Gropius recommended that
Moholy-Nagy be the director of the
New Bauhaus in Chicago. After his
death the institution was reorganized,
renamed, and has survived as part
of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Mihály Munkácsy
Born Munkács [Mukachevo, Ukraine]
February 20, 1844;
died Endenich, Germany
May 1, 1900.
Mihály Munkácsy was born into a
lower-middle-class family of German
origin. Orphaned at an early age,
he became a carpentry apprentice
and taught himself to paint. In 1865,
he got help from several patrons
and went to study in Vienna, then
in Munich where, in contrast to
dominant traditions of history
painting, he produced peasant
genres. In 1867, he traveled to Paris
and became strongly impressed by
the work of Gustave Courbet and
the plein-air paintings of the Barbizon
School. Between 1868 and 1871,
while continuing his studies in
Düsseldorf, he completed his first
large-scale work, The Convict, which
won the Gold Medal of the Paris
Salon in 1870. Encouraged by this
unexpected success, he moved to
Paris in the fall of 1871 and stayed
there for the rest of his life. In 1874
he married the widow of the baron
de Marches. After 1875 he turned
81

to landscapes, where the influence
of the Barbizon painters is visible.
From 1881 he painted dramatic
religious and historical subjects
in a highly dramatic style, including
the Hungarian Conquest (Hungarian
Parliament) and Apotheosis of the
Renaissance (ceiling of the staircase
in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna). He was also highly success-
ful with his paintings representing
the life of the rich in Paris. When
he became a wealthy celebrity in
Paris, he supported young artists.
Munkácsy died in a mental hospital
in Endenich, Germany, in 1900.
His work is represented in the
museums of Vienna, Philadelphia,
Chicago, and in New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
82
István Nádler
Born Visegrád November 29, 1938.
After graduating from the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts, István Nádler
traveled to France on various grants
1965 to 1972. He was awarded a
stipend by the Folkwang Museum,
Essen in 1974 and 1975–79. He has
been a member of the Budapesti
Műhely, an association of prominent
neo-avant-garde artists including,
among others, Ilona Keserü, Imre
Bak, and Tamás Hencze. In 1982 he
received the Special Prize of the
Jury at the International Festival of
Painting at Cagnes-sur-Mer. In 1985
he received the First Prize of the
Fourth European Biennale of Prints
in Baden-Baden. Nádler was awarded
with a great number of grants in,
among other places, Rome, Lisbon,
Zug, and Florence. In 2001 he was
awarded the Kossuth Prize, the
highest official recognition by the
Republic of Hungary.
József Nemes-Lampérth
Born Budapest 1891;
died Sátoraljaújhely 1924.
József Nemes-Lampérth enrolled
first in the Hungarian Academy of
Decorative Arts, then the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts where he
studied with István Bosznay and
Tivadar Zemplényi. He refused to
obey his masters and made stylized
rather than realistic pictures. He was
forced to leave the Academy. He
went to Nagybánya and then to
Paris in 1913. World War I interrupted
his studies. He was drafted and
wounded. He joined the avant-garde
circle of Lajos Kassák, published
many of his drawings in his journal
Ma, participated in the Exhibition
of Young Artists in Budapest, 1917,
and the Ma exhibition in 1918.
The Budapest Museum of Fine Arts
purchased some of his works in
1918. He worked as an art teacher
at the Proletarian Art Studio during
the 1919 Commune, so he had to
leave after the defeat of the
Commune. He traveled to Vienna
and then Berlin, where he participated
in an exhibition at the Fritz Gurlitt
Gallery. He lived in great poverty,
but the Swedish art collector Gustaf
Konrad Ekström invited him to
his estate in Sweden so he could
work free of financial worries.
Nemes-Lampérth’s mental health
collapsed and he was obliged to
return to Hungary, where he was
hospitalized and diagnosed with
manic depression. During his time
at the asylum he had few periods of
active work; he died in the asylum.
Lili Ország
Born Ungvár [Uzhhorod, Ukraine]
August 8, 1926;
died Budapest October 1, 1978.
Lili Ország wanted to be a painter
from the age of twelve. In spring
1944 she was locked up with the
Jews of her native town in the local
brick factory awaiting deportation.
She escaped and spent the rest of
the war hiding in Budapest. After
the war she enrolled in the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts and studied
with István Szőnyi and Róbert Berény,
1945–1950. In 1953 she met the
painter Endre Bálint, who was the
first to recognize her potential as
a significant artist and to encourage
her to follow her vision. Throughout
most of her life Ország earned her
living as a puppet designer for the
Hungarian State Puppet Theater. At
the same time she was developing
a considerable body of work. Her
travels to Bulgaria, Prague, Jerusalem,
Naples, and Pompeii inspired her to
incorporate ancient forms, relics,
signs, and writings into her work.
She had many important exhibitions
in Hungary as well as in Rome
(1969), Paris (1970), Warsaw (1972),
Federal Republic of Germany (1976,
1978), and Tel Aviv (1977).
83
 Pál Szinyei Merse
Born Szinyeújfalu [Chminianska Nová
Ves, Slovakia] July 4, 1845;
died Jernye [Jarovnice, Slovakia],
February 2, 1920.
Pál Szinyei Merse was born into a
noble Hungarian family of respected
lineage. He enrolled in the Munich
Academy of Fine Arts in 1864, where
he was trained to be a highly skilled
painter and draftsman. He was
taught the academic style that he
rejected. He was more interested in
the works of his more-free-spirited
contemporaries Gustave Courbet and
Arnold Böcklin, as well as in the real
potential of color. He caused dismay
with his colorful, serene, plein-air
paintings, particularly Picnic in May
(1873). It was dismissed by the
rigidly traditional and authoritative
Hungarian Academy. This failure
discouraged him, and he ceased
to work as an artist. He retired to
his estate and married. Painting
became an occasional pastime.
He took up painting again in 1882,
but he was again unsuccessful.
The Academy would not allow the
free use of natural light, a choice
of subject matter, and color. Szinyei
Merse was only first understood
and appreciated after 1896 when
the younger generation discovered
him and saw him as their forerunner.
In 1897 he was elected to the
Hungarian Parliament. In 1905 he
became director of the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts. He
showed his work in retrospective
exhibitions in Hungary and abroad
to considerable success.
84
Imre Szobotka
Born Zalaegerszeg 1890;
died Budapest 1961.
Imre Szobotka studied at the
Hungarian Academy of Decorative
Arts, 1905–10 and made study
trips to Venice, Rome, and Paris.
In 1911 he traveled to Transylvania
and exhibited the paintings he had
made there in his first one-man
show. The time in Paris, to which
he returned, had a decisive impact
on his painting. He enrolled in
the Académie de la Palette, where
he met Jean Metzinger and Henri
Le Fauconnier. In 1913 and 1914
he exhibited at the Salon des
Indépendants. When World War I
broke out he was interned in
Bretagne (Brittany) as an enemy
alien. He returned to Hungary in
1919, and became an important
representative of modern art.
He was a founding member of
KÚT (New Society of Artists) and
regularly exhibited his works.
His cubist period is still considered
his best.
István Szonyi
˝
Born Újpest [Budapest]
January 17, 1894;
died Zebegény August 31, 1960.
István Szőnyi attended the Free
Evening School of the Budapest
Academy of Fine Arts, where
he befriended Béla Uitz and János
Kmetty. In 1913 he became a regular
student at the Academy, first training
as an art teacher, then as a painter
with Károly Ferenczy and later with
István Réti. In the summer of 1914
he won a stipend to reside and paint
at the Nagybánya Artists’ Colony.
He was drafted and served in
World War I, but was discharged
because of an illness and returned to
Nagybánya to paint in 1917 and 1918.
During the 1919 Commune he was
active as the leader of the art division
of the Young Worker’s Union and
was consequently excluded from
the Academy. However, he could
participate in art exhibitions. In 1920
he won the award of the newly
formed Szinyei Merse Pál Society,
and had his first solo exhibition in
1921. He participated at the first
KÚT (New Society of Artists)
exhibition in 1924, and was generally
regarded as the member of the
young generation who would carry
on this artistic tradition.
In 1924 he married and moved to
Zebegény, a picturesque village on
the curve of the Danube, where he
lived and worked for the rest of his
life. The landscape and the people
of Zebegény became his signature
subjects. He became a celebrated
painter, winning awards and stipends
including the prestigious grant of
the Hungarian Academy in Rome
in 1928. In the early 1930s he was,
along with his friends Aurél Bernáth
and Róbert Berény, a central figure
of the Gresham Circle, a group of
figurative painters whose program
was to revive the art of Szinyei and
post-impressionism and keep art
insulated from politics. During the
German occupation of Hungary
Szőnyi helped several Jews offering
them shelter at great personal risk.
During the siege of Budapest,
1944-45, a bomb hit his studio,
destroying many of his works.
He was professor at the Hungarian
Academy of Fine Arts beginning
in 1938. After World War II his art
was recognized with a number of
state awards. His home in Zebegény
is now a museum dedicated to
his work.
85
 Béla Uitz Lajos Vajda

Born Temes-Mehela, Romania Born Zalaegerszeg August 1908;

March 8, 1887; died Budapest September 7, 1941.
died Budapest January 26, 1972.
Lajos Vajda enrolled in the
Béla Uitz was trained as a locksmith Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in
in his childhood like his future friend 1927, where he studied with István
and brother-in-law Lajos Kassák. He Csók until 1930. In 1928 Vajda,
enrolled in the Hungarian Academy as an ambitious representative of
of Decorative Arts to study mural the younger generation, joined the
painting in 1907, but transferred to Munka Kör (Work Circle) led by
the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts Lajos Kassák. The younger artists
in 1908, where he studied with clashed with Kassák, who was
Ede Balló and Károly Ferenczy. His unwilling to accept their bias against
peers were János Kmetty, József his somewhat rigid version of
Nemes-Lampérth, Péter Dobrovits, constructivism. Vajda and Dezső
and Andor Erős. In 1912 he married Korniss traveled to Paris where they
a sister of Kassák. From 1915 he studied with Fernand Léger. During
regularly published articles in his four-year stay in Paris, Vajda
Kassák’s journals, A Tett (The Action) encountered not only cubism
and Ma (Today). Eventually Uitz and surrealism but also Russian
became the co-editor of Ma. He constructivism. He took an interest
was active during the 1919 Hungarian in film, photography, and collage,
Commune as director of a proletarian
school of artists and as a painter and
poster designer. After the defeat
of the Commune he was arrested,
but was allowed to leave for Vienna.
He also lived in Berlin and Paris until
his 1926 departure for the Soviet
Union where he remained until
1970. In 1968 the Hungarian National
Gallery in Budapest organized a
retrospective exhibition of his works.
Shortly afterward he returned
to Hungary.

86

and made a series of photomon-
tages. Back in Hungary Vajda met his
future wife Julia Richter, a painter. He
lived and worked in Szentendre in
great poverty. In 1937 he and Korniss
embarked on an ambitious program
to collect and organize motifs of
Hungarian peasant art, which they
began at the neighboring village of
Szigetmonostor. In his subsequent
painterly work Vajda used Hungarian,
Serbian, and Jewish motifs juxta-
posed or layered in his compositions.
His work was a synthesis of
surrealism and constructivism,
regional and European, the individual
and cultural. In his last years Vajda
suffered from tuberculosis. As a
Jew, he was repeatedly drafted for
forced labor service, and he was
unable to fight the disease. The
retrospective exhibition of his work
at the Alkotás Művészház, a major
venue in Budapest in 1943, revealed
Vajda as the most original, visionary,
and powerful artist of his generation.
He is now recognized as one of the
most important painters of twentieth-
century Hungarian art.
János Vaszary
Born Kaposvár 1867;
died Budapest 1939.
János Vaszary studied with the
famous nineteenth-century
Hungarian romanticist Bertalan
Székely. In 1887 he enrolled in
the Munich Academy of Fine Arts,
where he was most interested
in modernist tendencies. In 1899
he started to study at the Académie
Julian in Paris. He designed
tapestries in art nouveau style
and painted realist pictures around
1900, but became increasingly
influenced by impressionism. In
1920 he was appointed professor
at the Hungarian Academy of Fine
Arts in Budapest. He developed
his signature sketchy and colorful
style reminiscent of Raoul Dufy
and Kees van Dongen. He joined
the KÚT (New Society of Artists)
and was a founding member of
UME (Association of New Artists).
Having won several prizes in
Hungary, he was awarded with
the Gold Medal in Genoa in 1929.
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1 2
Contributors

1 2
Éva Forgács
Éva Forgács is an art historian and
critic. She graduated from the
Eötvös Loránd University and earned
her PhD in art history at the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
She was a professor on the faculty
of László Moholy-Nagy University
in Budapest, and now is adjunct
professor at the Art Center College
of Design, Pasadena, California.
Forgács is the author of many essays
on Hungarian and Central European
art in a number of anthologies and
journals such as ArtForum, Third
Text, Centropa, The Structurist,
ARTMargins, and Hungarian Art.
She is also active as a curator and
a critic and writes on issues of
contemporary art. Her books include
The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus
Politics (1995) and monographs on
László Fehér and other Hungarian
artists. She has edited and co-edited
volumes such as the ground-breaking
Between Worlds: A Source Book
of Central European Avant-Gardes,
1910–1930 (2002).
90
Steven Mansbach
Steven Mansbach, educated at
Cornell and Princeton universities, is
professor of the history of twentieth-
century art, University of Maryland.
He is the author of many scholarly
books, articles, exhibition catalogues,
and essays that examine the genesis
and reception of modern art and
architecture. For the last thirty years
he has focused his scholarly work
on the history, functions, and
meaning of modernism in Central
and Eastern Europe. He has taught
art history at universities in Europe,
Africa, and the United States, the
Pratt Institute, and the Free University
of Berlin, among them. He was
associate dean of the Center for
Advanced Study in the Visual Arts,
National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., at various times, 1987–97.
Among his many publications, he is
perhaps best known for Modern Art
in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic
to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939
(Cambridge University Press, 1999).
István Rozsics
István Rozsics, educated in Pécs in
English and Hungarian literature, is a
historian, consultant, and art dealer.
He worked for Sotheby’s Hungary.
He then acquired one of Hungary’s
oldest rare bookstores, founded in
1896. In 1997 he founded István
Rozsics Gallery, an important forum
for Hungarian contemporary art. He
has written about Baron Lajos
Hatvany, the Hungarian writer and art
patron. He has served on the boards
of art and charitable foundations and
was chair of the Supervisory Board of
the Friends of the Budapest Museum
of Fine Arts. He is an expert on
Hungarian restitution cases. Since
the beginning of the Nancy G.
Brinker Collection, Rozsics has been
its senior curator.
Michael Ennis Additional Project
Curators Supervisor

Michael Ennis, educated in Oxford Ágnes Berecz Munira Alhad Hyder-Adam

in Politics, Philosophy and Economics Sam Albert Publications Manager
is an exhibition specialist and The Nancy G. Brinker Collection
independent curator. He worked for
Sotheby’s London before founding
his own company, Group Arte in
1995. He has organized numerous
exhibitions, including Masterpieces
from the Dulwich Picture Gallery
Collection, Madrid and Bilboa,
Spain (1996) and Highlights from
the Van Gogh Foundation, United
States (2000), among others. He
has assisted a variety of museums
with exhibition funding, notably The
Phillips Collection for its exhibition,
European and American Painting
and Sculpture 1760–1960 from the
Smith College Collection (2003).
He is currently Director of Exhibitions
for the Nancy G. Brinker Collection.

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