Self-portrait (around 1916)

István Szigethy was the best friend of Ede Bohacsek, after whose early death, in 1917, Lajos Kassák organized an exhibition in his memory, where mainly his drawings and oil paintings were presented.

István Szigethy became known primarily as a graphic artist, but from the 1920s he also exhibited his oil paintings combining the formal characteristics of Cubism and Expressionism. In 1923, Magyarság wrote of his collection exhibition at the Belvedere: "an individuality that managed to preserve the purity of his vision from the German and French forms of the latest trends. Szigethy's artistic development began with caricature, and his penchant for the grotesque still permeates all his work and is expressed most clearly in the highly characteristic conception of his themes. There is something reminiscent of Brueghel in his vision of man, but Szigethy is a much deeper analyst of his problems than the great German Walloon. With a constant eye for pure painterliness, he always grasps even the simplest of his dilemmas in some extraordinary unity, always manages to discover something new in them and presents them in a clear, monumental formal language'.