Rest (Around 1940)

Jenő Szabados was first called up for reserve military training in early 1936. He found his time in the army hard to bear and was against the inhumanities he experienced there.  The following year, he won a scholarship to the Hungarian Academy in Rome and spent eight months in Italy, which had a decisive influence on his art. The heightened intensity of colours and sharp lights of Italy illuminated his palette. His landscapes and cityscapes were often taken from above, with a strong sense of perspective, and he loved diagonal cuts and cut-outs, his street scenes always featuring the people who lived there.

He returned to his parents' house in Vecses after his scholarship expired, but his peaceful creative work was repeatedly interrupted by military call-ups. From the summer of 1938 he took part in the reconquest of the southern part of the Highlands, from June to October 1940 he served in the army again during the invasion of Transylvania, and in the spring of 1941 he was absent for three months during the reoccupation of the South. Finally, in March 1942, he put on his military uniform again and was posted to the Soviet front at the end of April, where he was killed in action on 8 August, in a firefight south of Voronezh, near the village of Storozsevoje. 

Szabados loved simple, everyday subjects, and it was often the man at work or at rest and his surroundings that captured him and he considered them worthy of being captured. His works reflect a momentary grasp of reality, a praise of a life spent working with one's hands. In the oil painting Resting, the artist depicts tired soldiers from a top view, as in his Italian paintings, arranged in a diagonal composition. But he 'tells' their story not only by painting the figures in various resting postures, but also by the play of colours, which tell the story of the end of the day through the wan rays of the setting sun. Szabados's military works typically depict the bucks not in battle, in heroic poses, but in resigned apathy or harmonious scenes of janisserie.