Dream (1921)

János Schadl's father was the architect of the manor of Prince Tasziló Festetics and a teacher at the Georgikon Academy of Economics. After completing his high school education, he also enrolled at the Keszthely Economic Academy, but he wanted to pursue an artistic career, so he left the school two years later. He studied music in Vienna with the world-famous Emil Sauer (1862-1942), a former pupil of Ferenc Liszt. Lajos Kassák and Aurél Bernáth later wrote about his outstanding musical talent in their diary novels.

In 1915/1916 he was taught by Károly Ferenczy at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, but at the end of the academic year he turned his back on the college as well, finding it too conservative. He sought contact with the progressive artists of the time and joined the circle of Lajos Kassák and the journal Ma. His drawing skills and talent enabled him to emerge as a mature artist after a brief formal study of painting. His early paintings were expressive, his forms were strong and then, under the influence of Cubism, they became block-like. In 1918, he had a solo exhibition in the exhibition space of the journal Ma and participated in the MA III exhibition, together with Sándor Bortnyik, János Mattis Teutsch, Béla Uitz, János Kmetty, József Nemes-Lampérth and Pátzay Pal. Among the activists, Schadl represented his own way and style, which was later called cubo-expressionism. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, his comrades emigrated abroad, but Schadl refused to go. First he went to the countryside, and from 1922 he settled permanently in Tata, where he met his wife. He represented progressive art here, and Aurél Bernáth's famous expressionist portfolio drew much from Schadl's art. 

After 1919, his art showed an increased inclination towards transcendence, spiritualism and religion. Already in the late 1910s, light began to replace speculative forms as the principle of form. This would become the leitmotif of his oeuvre, the unfolding of which can be traced in his graphics. The geometric, cubist but rounded forms gradually soften until the objects become patterned and plastic by light. In the early 1920s, Schadl also created waterfront landscapes glowing in mystical poison green and royal blue. This is the case with the large oil painting Dream, now on view, which certainly had the lakes of Tata as its background. Here and there, light breaks through the dense, dark, sprawling and swirling vegetation, creating a transcendent atmosphere. The expressive language is replaced by symbolic enigma, the concrete visual spectacle carrying coded meanings. It is not the landscape itself that is essential, but the vision of a new world, built along regular and internal structures, fed by mysterious spiritual energies. According to Schadl's interpretation, darkness is associated with negative forces. The Dream fits into the post-World War I painting movement of mystical, religious, Arcadian themes, which was an expression of a general sense of crisis, anxiety and danger. On the other hand, it was driven by a desire for a pure world, above people and countries, governed by universal laws and nourished by divine energies.