Street in Castelnuovo (1918)

In 1921, in response to an article about him, Jenő Remsey published a letter of reply in the journal Nyugat. In it he summarised his life programme as follows: 'I can say, therefore, that my art is the result of the primordial material of my soul, the result of a virgin, primitive breeding - a true primitive art. Of course, such an art is not without models. [...] My masters, my role models, were titans who created style from themselves with tremendous power, - whose works are always primary, so much so that they remind one of no one's models. Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Dürer, Cranach, Breughel, Botticelli, - strange to say, what I am about to say, Axelius Galion, this ancient blacksmith'. He was forced to defend himself because the critics did not understand the stylization, the compression, the 'priitivism' of his colours and forms into almost geometric shapes. 

The Art Nouveau tone of Remsey's painterly beginnings was combined with a social sensibility in the 1900s and 1910s (e.g. The Beggar of Banffyhunyad, The Doll-Making Woman, The Wounded, The Factory, The Moloch, The City, The Proletarians, The Capital). At the outbreak of the First World War, he was conscripted as a soldier along with his brother. Jenő was sent to the Russian front, Zoltán to the Italian front. Jenő enlisted as a conscript as a steward, then worked as a war painter at the press headquarters. Castelnuovo Street (1918) was painted at the end of the war and shows a bold composition in which Remsey deliberately inserted a light pole into the left side of the picture. All around it is only the barren wall and the empty road of the same colour, while on the other side of the divider, nature sprawls and the memories of humanity tower, with the medieval church steeple at its centre.