Parisian Street (1912)

In the summer of 1899, Viktor Erdei attended Simon Hollósy's free school in Nagybánya, and in the same year he entered his charcoal drawings in the National Salon exhibition. He was a pupil of Bertalan Székely at the Fine Arts School (now the College of Fine Arts). He returned to Nagybánya in 1903, when he worked with Károly Ferenczy. He held his first collective exhibition in 1907, where he showed his oil paintings, prints, etchings and head sculptures. He was the founder of the artist group KÉVE, which was formed at this time. In 1908, he married Adél Jusztina Karinthy, sister of Frigyes Karinthy. In 1908-1909, he studied in Munich, in 1912 in Paris. He made lithographs for Béla Révész's Beethoven, Miniature. He emigrated after the fall of the Soviet Republic. He returned home from Vienna in 1924 and settled in Nagyszőlős.In 1926 he held his second exhibition of collections at the National Salon. Viktor Erdei "is not one artist, but two. One is represented by his paintings, his portraits, landscapes and small compositions, the other by his drawings. The first is the fine tonal painter he was brought up to be in Nagybánya. But he is also a soul-searcher, who evokes with a tender feeling the reflections of the shy soul in the shadows. In his entire oeuvre, these portraits are the most complete works, because in them will, intention and instinct are united in the most perfect harmony to become reality", wrote Arthur Elek in Nyugat.

During the decade he spent in Nagyszőlős, Erdei studied the life of Transcarpathian Jewry, drawing and painting its ancient traditions and characteristic types. The fruits of this period were exhibited in his third exhibition at the Ernst Museum in 1934. Afterwards he lived again in Budapest. From 1939 onwards, his drawings appeared in exhibitions of the OMIKE art group, the last time in March 1944. He lived through the siege of the capital in the Budapest ghetto, where he died shortly after its liberation.

Zoltán Felvinczi Takács wrote about Erdei that he was constantly consumed by an inner fire, and that during the disintegration of the art of Nagybánya, the "instinctive man" was also revived in him. According to Artur Elek, two artists reside in him, a subtle painter of tones and a soul-seeker. Erdei visited Paris in 1912, and the icon-sized oil painting above was made there and then. In that and the previous year he had a joint exhibition with Lajos Gulácsy and his wife Ada Karinthy, first in Oradea and then in Szeged. Like Gulácsy and unlike their contemporaries, Erdei did not necessarily experience life in the mecca of modern art as a revelation. Although he was more influenced by the trends of the moment. "He is not a seeker, he just walks among us with open eyes, picking up what comes naturally to him", wrote Lajos Fülep about him. The Parisian Street (1912) mystically reach towards the sky, conveying a sense of anxiety or melancholy. The city is sleeping, the title originally given to it by Erdei. It is probably dawn, as indicated by the iridescent lights on the firewall of the first building on the right. There is also something erotic about the way the houses lean or the interplay of colours. The painting was exhibited in Erdei's 1926 retrospective.