Biography
Between 1917 and 1920 he was a student of Ede Balló, Dezső Pécsi-Pilch and István Réti at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, and between 1922 and 1924 he worked with Adolf Fényes at the Szolnok Art School. He visited Paris several times on study trips. From 1920 he participated in exhibitions, was a member of the KUT and UME. From 1929 to the 1940s he lived and worked in Szentendre. He painted in Zebegény in 1936 and 1943 and made a study trip to Italy in 1939. During the Second World War, he was sent to a labour camp, and his sketchbooks made there are kept in the Hungarian Jewish Museum. From 1948 he came to Nagymaros to paint, and it was on his initiative that the Nagymaros Artists' Colony was founded. In 1929-34 he had a collective exhibition at the Ernst Museum, and in 1961 his memorial exhibition was held in the Kunsthalle's chamber hall.
In the early 1920s, his greatest influence on his art was the work of István Réti, who conveyed the tradition of plein-air painting in Nagybánya, and Adolf Fényes in Szolnok. He was further stimulated by his study trips to Paris, beginning in 1927, by French painting, especially the works of Matisse, and by Oriental (Persian and Hindu) art. Between 1927 and 1934, his painting was dominated by a classicist, clean line and a decorative arrangement of colour patches. His portraits from this period are associated with the École de Paris, particularly his most frequent pictures of his model, his wife, his series of self-portraits, his nudes, his decorative landscapes and his representative flower and fruit still lifes in brilliant colours. These works have been exhibited in progressive artists' associations, the New Society of Artists and the New Artists' Association. From the mid-1930s, the predominance of the graphic element and flat surfaces of colour ceased, and a more objective, corporeal and expansive period began in his painting. These painterly aspirations gradually lead to the post-Nagybánya, impressionistic landscapes of the 1940s and 1950s in Zebegény and Nagymaros.