Parisian nude (1928)

After meeting the Kernstok circle in Nyergesújfalu in 1919, Rafael travelled to Budapest, where he began to study medicine and music, and after abandoning his sculpture studies he entered the Academy of Fine Arts under János Vaszary.He finished his art studies in 1926, and a year later he successfully participated in the Venice Biennale, and later became a member of the New Society of Artists, and after its dissolution of the New Artists' Association. In 1928, he won the Society's Graphic Design Prize and travelled to Paris, where he was exposed to the sweeping artistic currents of the time. On his return home, he had an exhibition with Jenő Gadányi at the Tamás Gallery, and in the winter of 1929 he set off for the East, where he lived and worked in Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, among other places, until the outbreak of the Second World War.

The Female Nude was made in Paris at the same time as Raphael was writing his theoretical reflection on Art and Culture, which so vividly illustrates his artistic worldview and his approach to art. The ink drawing blends the aspirations and achievements of Expressionism, Cubism and Constructivism. Rafael presented his Paris paintings in an exhibition with Jenő Gadányi at the Tamás Gallery in 1930. "In all these paintings, Rafael is in fact preoccupied with a single central problem: he wants to get at the inner structure of phenomena - be they landscapes, objects or human figures - beneath the surface. This is not a Cubist or Constructivist endeavour, and is therefore not an intellectual one. Raphael belongs to a new generation for whom the method of image-making is no longer the most important problem, but one that has already received and thus absorbed the laws of a new pictoriality. With this knowledge, he can return to the direct observation of phenomena and, instead of experimenting, he can grasp the architecture of things, the constructive essence of phenomena, in a purely visual way. This grasping of constructive points is perhaps even a little overemphasised in Raphael's pictorial formulation, which may be due to the fact that Raphael is a graphic talent par excellence. He sees phenomena primarily in form and in black and white, and where colour is used, his colours are not always an integral part of the unity of the picture, but rather an illustrative contribution to the form and formal construction. This last point does not mean, however, that Raphael is not a confident and conscious master of colour: in his beautiful Parastelle, the architecture of form and the colour that illustrates it are fused into an organic whole. And that is precisely how his landscapes are unified, especially those that appear in pure black and white and which, with perhaps a little less formal rigour, promise the most beautiful unfolding', writes Pesti Napló about the exhibition.