Biography
Between 1916 and 1919 he studied at the Budapest College of Fine Arts, where he was a student of Károly Ferenczy and later István Réti. In 1919 he worked with Vilmos Csaba Perlrott at the Kecskemét Artists' Camp, and in 1920 he settled in Nagybánya. He first exhibited a landscape at the Transylvanian Salon in Cluj in 1921. His solo exhibition was held in Nagybánya in the Berger confectionery in 1925, which he took to Kolozsvár and Arad. In 1925-27, he worked in Paris, where his artistic influences included Chagall, Picasso and Foujita. In 1932 he took on the teaching of left-wing young people expelled from the colony. From 1932-37 he lived in Bucharest, then moved back to Nagybánya. He was deported in 1944.
He initially embraced the impressionism of Nagybánya, but in Paris he was influenced by the almost graphic line-grids of Foujita and the decorative colour fields of Gauguin. His miners, ploughmen and fruit pickers are emphatic in their simplicity, his frescoes are related to the socially oriented János Mattis Teutsch, his emblematic depictions of workers to Noémi Ferenczy and, more distantly, to István Dési Huber.
In his early compositions the figure is almost always alone, later he places his figures more and more often in the landscape, but never paints a picture where man is only part of nature, a decorative patch of colour or a compositional prop. During his years in Paris and afterwards in his native country, nude compositions predominate, rarely landscape or still life. His nudes are translucent, almost disembodied, timeless, mystical, yet passive and never erotic. After her studio sessions, the nude female figures are rendered in landscape and assembled into multi-figure compositions. The early thirties saw a radical change in his oeuvre, with his subjects becoming the worker, the miner, the cubist, the fallen. His compositions (particularly his linocuts) are mono-planar, completely lacking perspective, the ground is still white (often plaster), but the contours are harder, the colours are sombre, the figures express a difficult struggle and a sense of hopelessness. Also in this period, in some of his paintings, he begins to abandon the contour, painting his figures in a slightly plastic silhouette, and landscape and perspective begin to emerge. The colours are still few, mostly slightly toned whites, and the darkest browns and dark ochres.
From the second half of the thirties onwards, his paintings are larger and more colourful. The militant message of his paintings is mostly dissolved into a proclamation of work and the beauty of nature. In the last period of his life, he returned to Impressionism, painting landscapes on the Izvora or intérieurs, rarely still lifes. He also creates small compositions with two or three figures, dominated by strong contrasts of colour, the figures
stylized, less plastic than in his previous paintings, the landscape barely marked. These paintings are most often compared to those of Gauguin.
