Still Life with Fish (1960s)

Miklós Somos attended the Academy of Fine Arts between 1951-1957, where his teacher was Géza Fónyi. He participated in national exhibitions from the mid-fifties. His individual style, which Géza Perneczky called lyrical realism, was related to constructivist painting and developed in the early 1960s. His suggestive paintings are characterised by a strong plasticity in relief, a tight structure, closed simplified forms and a reduced use of colour. In his works, landscapes, nudes and portraits, he goes beyond the specific features of reality. His paintings can be compared to those of Jenő Barcsay, Endre Domanovszky and Béla Kondor. In 1963 he also made ceramic paintings in Hódmezővásárhely. In the early seventies his painting was renewed. Instead of gloomy scenes, he painted cubo-surrealistic spaces and still lifes with a colourful palette, and by the 1980s his works had become even more relaxed. 

In Still Life with Fish, Somos composes in a summarizing, constructive manner, but he gives his objects a curved form, and despite the flatness and the varied surface treatment, the motifs are arranged in an organic, rhythmic sequence. Fish still lifes have a long tradition in modern Hungarian painting. One need only recall the paintings of this type by Gyula Derkovits, Endre Bálint, Aurél Bernáth or Vladimir Szabó. It is no coincidence that in Somos's painting the fish can even be seen as a knife. On the one hand, the fish is a symbol of poverty, which is why it is often depicted unwrapped from newspaper, and in Christian iconography it is primarily a symbol of Christ (who was sacrificed).