Waiters (1941)

At the College of Fine Arts he was a student of Imre Révész, who continued the Munkácsy tradition. He also visited Nagybánya with him in 1918 as a third-year student. Still, he acknowledged Ágost Benkhard as his master, who was his assistant teacher for four years at the reorganised College. Between 1921 and 1927, he spent his summers at the Miskolc Artists' Camp. In 1922, while working as a teaching assistant at the College, he won the KÉVE Artists' Association prize for his painting 'Student Home'. The painting was purchased by the capital of Budapest. In 1924, he again won the Kéve Grand Prize, this time for one million crowns, with his oil painting 'Landscape'. The following year he was elected a full member of Kéve. The young Nyíregyháza artist's star rose, cities bought his paintings, in 1927 the Museum of Fine Arts bought one of his paintings, and in 1928 he won the Noble Marcel Prize, which enabled him to spend two months in Italy. Unfortunately, none of Barzo's works from the years 1932-35 are currently known. The artist, who had been modestly in the background, came to the attention of the professional public again in 1937. During the summers he visited Tihany several times and Szentendre. In 1940 he exhibited with the UME. On the day of the opening of his 1944 collection exhibition, German troops marched into Budapest, and for understandable reasons the exhibition had no echo. After that, the easily discouraged and self-doubting artist had neither the strength nor the will to continue working. 

In his early period Barzo worked in a post-Nagybánya style, and after his study trip to Italy he was also influenced by neoclassicism. In the mid-1930s, the ever-doubting artist retired for a time. Then the serenity disappeared from his art. His high horizon landscapes of rolling hills, his mysterious forests, his excited, restless or melancholic transcriptions of the natural experience. His village scenes are sombre, almost foreboding. In 1939 he began to paint pastels, presumably for financial reasons. His peasants are haggard, hopeless and despondent. His masterly handling of chalk, at first contoured and later increasingly blotchy, is powerful and subtle. His linework evokes passion and restlessness, his neutral greys, acerbic browns and blacks suggest despair. He holds back the colours with increasing intensity, but with the opaque whites he is able to bring out wonderful pearl colours. He stuck more to oranges and olive greens, with which he could strike quite unusual individual colour chords, as can be seen in Waiters. There are chalk drawings in which he uses these or only one of them in black. In his most mature pastels, the splashes of colour are independent of contours, the subtle strokes have only indicative value, yet those few loose strokes can send emotions soaring with wonderful aptness.