Pre-War Figurative Art
(1922 - 1950)
Signature
Signed bottom right: Lakatos 1909
His drawing and composing skills were already evident in high school. His caricatures appeared in the leading glossy magazines of the time (Márton Kakas, Mátyás Schüler). He studied figure drawing at the School of Industrial Drawing and then graduated from the School of Model Drawing with a diploma as a drawing teacher. He continued his studies with Bertalan Székely and then with Simon Hollósy in Munich. In Paris, he exhibited at the Salon D'Automne and was elected a regular member of the Salon. On his return home, he became a teacher at the School of Industrial Design in Budapest for 35 years, where he organised the textile department.
Lakatos began his career as a painter, to which he has always remained faithful, but his work has extended to almost every field of applied art, from carpet and furniture design to book covers. In his interior design work, he designed each object himself. He also designed and furnished exhibition pavilions. As a painter he exhibited from 1902. He has had collective exhibitions at the Kálmán Könyves Salon (1911), the National Salon (1918), the Adolf Fényes Room (1960) and the Fészek Klub in 1963. He has received numerous awards for his artistic work.
Artúr Lakatos's early paintings were characterised by naturalism, and in Paris he became acquainted with Impressionism and Art Nouveau. In his 1909 watercolour, he uses a popular Impressionist painting type, the bird's-eye view of a large city. Lakatos effortlessly captures the vibrations of the damp air caused by the rain, the play of light and reflections, and is able to recreate the gloomy atmosphere with the almost completely empty street and the use of colour.