African woman (1933)

Although his drawing skills and general artistic interest stood out in high school, he chose to become a lawyer after graduation. It was a life-changing experience when he met István Győrffy, a great ethnographer in Túrkevé. It was then - in the years 1925-1926 - that the working relationship between the two men began, which later led to the illustration of several excellently written and edited volumes. This is what led Andrást Csikós Tóth to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of Gyula Rudnay and Oszkár Glatz, and was introduced to the world of fine art. He became a teaching assistant at the College where he mainly taught drawing and watercolour. In 1934-35 he taught at the Reformed Teachers' Training College in Nagykőrös, and from 1935 to 1943 at the Reformed Gymnasium in Kecskemét. He organised an ethnographic section, with whom he collected ethnographic data in and around Kecskemét. He also gave interesting and informative ethnographic lectures in Kecskemét and its vast farmland. In 1943 he was sent to Budapest to work as an art lecturer at the National Council of Literature and Art. From 1945 until his death, he was chief curator of the Museum of Ethnography. 

Csikós-Tóth is credited, among other things, with the illustrations for the first volume of the Ethnography of Hungarian Ethnography and Bartók-Kodály's world-famous publications. The number of works of this type in his oeuvre is estimated at 2000. His pictures have been exhibited in the Kunsthalle and the National Salon. Throughout his career, he did much to promote peasant culture and art. There is no record of Csikós-Tóth having visited Africa, but perhaps that is not the point, because considering his interest it is not at all surprising that he was also interested in African culture. The African Woman, dated 1933, is not so much an ethnographic observation as a 'black' icon (or 'black' Mary) with a gold background (radiating transcendence) in the form of the image. The plasticity of the beautiful woman recalls the work of István Szőnyi and the Arcadian circle.