Boy with small car (1935 körül)

Erzsébet Lóránt studied at the College of Fine Arts between 1916 and 1924, under the tutelage of Oszkár Glatz and István Csók. In 1925, she was included in the exhibition of the Szinyei Merse Pál Society's prizewinners. In 1933, 1934 and 1936 she exhibited regularly at the exhibitions of the Hungarian Women Artists' Association at the National Salon. In 1939 one of her paintings was selected for the Riverside Museum in New York. 

Her greatest successes came in the 1930s. István Genthon considered her a 'virtuoso painter'. Based on the titles of her paintings, her works can be divided into two major groups. The first group consists of works depicting the modern metropolis and the new entertainment possibilities for city dwellers (Card Game, Jazz, Habitué in the Local, Butcher Shop, Piano Concert), while the second group consists of paintings representing the inhabitants of the suburbs and the social problems of metropolises (Nude with Mirror, Struggle, Chicken, Slaughter, Baggage Carriers, Street Life). She consciously distances herself from the stereotypically perceived 'feminine' painting. Her paintings are characterised by diagonal composition, bold cuts and distortions, the swirling of inner tension, the swirling lines, the rawness of the painting style, which show affinities with the Eight, but even more with the Fauves and Expressionist works of Sándor Galimberti and Valeria Dénes. At the turn of the millennium, in their rediscovery of the female Eight and women's art, Lóránt and Márton Piroska Futásfalvi were referred to by critics as "Feminine Fauves".

The Boy with small car (circa 1935) is one of Lóránt's suburban, socially themed works. Here, the structure of the picture is particularly striking, as it is adapted to the diagonal of the picture plane: the figure of the boy with his carriage trailing behind him literally bisects the picture surface from the upper right to the lower left. This gives the whole composition a sense of momentum and movement, which is further reinforced by the street and the row of houses with their sculpted, cobbled ground. In an interview, Lóránt said: 'There is only one thing more interesting than the real world: the expression of its essence, and I feel that the essence of the essence is movement'. The forms are enclosed in dark, thick contours. The scene presumably takes place at dusk, as suggested by the purples and pinks, the torch (?) in the boy's hand, and the one or two bright windows in the background.