Factory Yard (1938 körül)

After dropping out of high school, he tried various professions, and after eight years of misery, he volunteered for military service in 1914. In 1918, he returned home to Dés, where he learned goldsmithing with his father. In 1921, he moved to Pest and, while working at the Polgár silverware factory, attended the evening classes of the School of Applied Arts and then the free school of Artur Podolini-Volkmann. His first exhibition at the Podolini School was in 1924. In the same year he went to Italy with Andor Sugár to earn a living and learn about art. Settling in Milan, he took up a job as a goldsmith. In the museums he became thoroughly acquainted with Italian art, and in the practical field he learned the basics of copper engraving from Béla Krón. The black and white technique dominates this period, and a small number of pastels were also produced. In 1927, with their livelihoods becoming more difficult, they returned to Hungary with the intention of travelling to Paris in a year or two. He exhibited the works of his first period with Andor Sugár at the Mentor Bookshop in 1928. 

A new phase in Dési-Huber's artistic development began after this. He was then influenced by the constructive-expressionist works of the Belgian artists Frans Masereel and Sándor Bortnyik from the late '10s. Theoretical grounding, combined with publications, became stronger in his work in the late twenties. For Dési, Cubist still life was the genre in which the language of the new socialist art could be developed. In 1930, he participated in the group exhibition New Progressive Artists at the Tamás Gallery, in the founding of the joint studio of socialist artists on Vasvári Street, and again made his debut at the Kovács Salon. In 1934, he and his wife were arrested on charges of communist subversion, but were both released for lack of evidence. From the mid-1930s Dési was in close contact with some of the painters of Szentendre, including Maria Modok and Jenő Barcsay. By the second half of the decade, his cubist paintings had been replaced by expressionist works. Ernő Kállai thought he recognised a rebirth of Hungarian Expressionism in Dési's painting. In 1935-36 he was again admitted to a sanatorium and underwent serious surgery. From 1937 he worked in Rákoscsaba, and in 1938 in Bátorliget, and had great success in the Ernst Museum in the company of Jenő Barcsay and Zoltán Székessy. In 1941, he published his essay Tanulmány a τέτα Order a művészetéről in the Christmas issue of Népszava, which provoked serious controversy. On 15 January 1944 he was transferred to the Budakeszi pulmonary sanatorium, where he died soon after. His multifaceted and conscious art was inspired by two defining experiences. The first was social experience, the fate of his class, the proletariat, the second was painterly: the summation of nature in the wake of Cézanne, the Cubists and the Expressionists. Dési Huber's oeuvre is the work of a modern Hungarian artist. 

The Factory Yard must have been made during Dési's last period, when the main subject of his pictures was the suburbs, the impersonal, alienated face of the city with its chimneys, firewalls, desolate and empty streets. As a result of this 'abstraction', the experience is one of a sense of absent beauty, of longing.