Lausanne landscape (Around 1920-1921)

János Simon György was born in 1894 to a wealthy Transylvanian merchant family in the port city of Trieste in Austria-Hungary (now Italy), where his father was a businessman and Hungarian consul. However, he spent most of his childhood in Timisoara, Transylvania, and Budapest. In 1912, he enrolled at the Hungarian Technical University to study architecture, but dropped out a year later to attend the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts instead. Simon spent two summers (1913-1914) at the Artists' Colony in Nagybánya, where he learned the fashionable Fauvist style. His career was interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as a cavalry officer on the Russian front and was seriously wounded in 1917. Disillusioned by the turmoil in Hungary after the war, Simon studied in Vienna, Lausanne and Milan. His works were first exhibited at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in Geneva in 1921. In the late 1920s Simon married his student, Hungarian painter Klára Rudas, but the marriage lasted only a few years. After spending a few years in Switzerland, he obtained the long-awaited French visa and moved to Paris, where he lived until 1936. In the French capital, he attended courses at the École des Beaux-Arts, the Academie Colarossi and the Academie Julian, and it was during this inter-war period that he changed his name to the French form, Jean-Georges Simon. 

The first stop of Simon's travelling life, which began in October 1920, was Lausenne, the site of his current ink-drawing. In one of the letters he sent home, he gave a detailed account of what he had been working on during his stay. In addition to the many colourful, vibrant cityscapes and portraits, there were "nude studios, small drawings, movements, on the table, everywhere, 300 selected, quick sketches, all good, all selected..." His first exhibition was in Geneva, where he exhibited five works at the Exposition Internationale d'Art Moderne. On the occasion of the exhibition, Iván Hevesy wrote an article about his art: 'He is not looking for the illusion of light and colour that flies into the soul of the moment, not for a glimpse of reality, but for a more permanent, more inner reality of the world. And to find it, he is predestined by the characteristic forces of his vision: his simplistic, synthetic perception and his excellent sense of external and internal construction, of balanced bodies. Simon's individuality tends towards a cubist vision of the world, but he attempts to express it with a surprising independence for a young man [...] He comes closer to reality by simplifying and extracting the image of the world'. Shortly afterwards, Simon had his first solo exhibition at the Bircher Gallery in Berne, and in December 1921 he went to Milan, where he was assisted by the opera singer Maria Bory Castellazzi. 

The Lausenne landscape bears witness to the influence of cubism, expressionism and Hungarian activism (Sándor Bortnyik, Béla Uitz and József Nemes Lampérth). By his own admission, Simon wanted to depict and convey the poeticism and essence of lines, shapes, masses (and colours) in a way that was as evocative as possible, similar to the way music is experienced.