Bertalan Pór

Bertalan Pór studied at the School of Design with László Gyulay, in Munich with G. von Hackl, at the Hollósy School, and then at the Julian Academy in Paris with Jean Paul Laurens. After his return, he became a permanent exhibitor at the Art Gallery. In 1907 he went on a study trip to Italy with Róbert Berény. He became a member of the Group of Eight, founded in 1910. 

 

During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he was the head of the painting department of the Art Directorate, and after the fall of the movement he emigrated to Sliač, Slovakia, where he lived from portrait painting. Painted landscapes, animal drawings. He spent the winter in Paris in 1934, while in 1936 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he illustrated the books of Ostrovsky and Alexander Gregory during his six-month stay, and received two large fresco assignments, sketches of which were no longer possible.

 

1938 he moved to Paris, where he had previously exhibited (1930, 1931 and 1932). His drawings appeared in Le Monde, edited by Barbusse in the early 1930s. He was arrested during the German occupation of Paris (1941), and after his release he supported the resistance movement with leaflets. In his period in Paris, his pastoral and bull compositions in a symbolic sense were mainly known. He returned home in 1948 and became a teacher at the College of Fine Arts. The main works of this era are portraits of dramatic power. He has taken part in many exhibitions, such as Berlin (1913), Vienna (1914), UNESCO (1946) and Paris (1948).

 

Overall, he represents a post-Nagybánya Hungarian avant-garde style based on great drawing skills in our painting. The metamorphosis of modern fine art trends (plein air, art nouveau, Paul Cézanne and other post-impressionists) and realism, also based on Munkácsy's traditions, is his distinctively individual painting style. This is what makes his portraits and landscapes so expressive and enjoyable.

 

Animal symbolism appears in his pictures in the 1930s. His animal symbolism expresses the calm before the storm, great strength and ever-increasing tension. His animal symbolism is manifested not only in the Spanish Civil War raging in the 1930s and the advance of fascism following Pablo Picasso in the bull symbolism in Pór's art, but also in 1958, when he painted his painting Let's Enter the Tszcs. Restlessness and tension emanate from the movement of the horses, which their owner would lead into the collective farm.