Biography
Károly Patkó was born in Budapest in 1895. He completed his studies here, then at the Academy of Fine Arts, first as a drawing teacher, and then from 1914 in the class of István Réti. In the summers of 1913 and 1914 he trained at the Nagybánya artist colony, and in 1922-1923 he was a further training student at the graphics department. He presented himself with plastic, full-figure, nude compositions. After the First World War, he painted in the studio of Róbert Berény in Városmajor with Vilmos Aba Novák and Erzsébet Korb. In 1923 he won the Rome scholarship of the Szinyei Pál Merse Society. He made a study trip to Italy and Paris, and in the mid-twenties he painted in Nagybánya and Felsőbánya, often together with Aba-Novák. In the mid-1920s, he painted in Felsőbánya with Vilmos Aba-Novák and Ernő Bánk every summer. In the summers of 1927 and 1928, they went to Igal to paint.
From 1927, he regularly participated in the exhibitions of the KUT and the Munkácsy Guild. Between 1929 and 1932, he visited Rome as a scholarship holder of the Collegium Hungaricum. During this period, he began his material experiments with tempera paints, and then switched to this technique. Károly Patkó, Vilmos Aba-Novák and István Szőnyi were the leading figures of the classicizing generation that emerged after World War I, the most important masters of the Roman School. The Roman School is the Hungarian version of Italian neoclassicism, the art of the novecento. The tempera technique that Patkó mastered in Italy was later adopted by Vilmos Aba-Novák from him and applied it with great success. Patkó was an excellent engraver, and his works are outstanding Hungarian works of the genre. His paintings were exhibited in collective exhibitions at the Belvedere in 1922, at the Helikon in 1923, and at the Ernst Museum in 1924, 1927, and 1932. Many of his paintings became private property and were also included in the Hungarian National Gallery.
