Standing Female Nude (1930 körül)

Imre Kuti Kupferstein was born in 1909 in Miskolc. He studied painting with Gyula Rudnay at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest between 1923 and 1928. Between 1925 and 1932 he participated in several group exhibitions at the National Salon. Around 1926 he worked at the art colony in Szeged, then Rudnay entrusted him with the management of the art colony in Makó in 1927. In 1944 he was a victim of the Holocaust.

Relatively little is known about Kupferstein's life and works. His early art was influenced primarily by Rudnay and Adolf Fényes. The titles of his paintings - The Wedding at Cana, The Queen of Sheba, Bacchanalia - allude to biblical and mythological themes, which Kupferstein, like Rudnay and Fényes, placed in a more sombre historical context, and are characterised by a strong theatricality and dramatic quality. During his years in Mako, Kupferstein mainly painted landscapes and street scenes, and in the 1930s his work was most closely related to that of Géza Vörös. His nude (oil and charcoal) paintings are also known, in which the woman depicted (often the same model) appears, sometimes alone and empty, sometimes with several others in an Arcadian scene. In the charcoal drawing of the Standing Female Nude, Kupferstein seems to have paid more attention to the body, and is able to render the figure plastic by drawing shadows. However, with the exception of the fashionable bob hairstyle, the face is exaggerated, almost mask-like.