Please don't hurt me! (1944)

Gitta Gyenes is one of the most talented Hungarian female artists (if gender is to be emphasised). In Nagybánya, at the beginning of her career, she followed the Nagybánya post-impressionist tradition. Then, in the 1920s, she made numerous caricatures of Hungarian public figures for newspapers. She later said that she had unwittingly offended many people. In 1914-1915, Gyenes took part in the World's Fair in San Francisco (USA), which was organised to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. She was awarded a silver medal in a large international field. On the occasion of her first collective exhibition (National Salon, 1917), Arthur Elek wrote a review of her art. Gyenes met Attila József in 1924, and their friendship is attested by a beautiful portrait (it is rumoured that Attila József was in love with her, and later with his daughter WalleszLuca). In the 1920s and 1930s, Gyenes became close to progressive movements, touched by Cubism and Expressionism, which she combined in her works. Meanwhile, in their Budapest apartment, Gyenes hosted art and literary gatherings called the Gyenes Literary Salon, which attracted young literary talent, where they read their new writings to each other and socialised. Art Deco is perhaps closest to her in the 1930s, and Artur Elek associates the paintings of Gitta Gyenes with the French Marie Laurencin, but without all the connotations. In 1937, the Tamás Gallery was the home of her paintings. Her last exhibition before the war opened in May 1943, where she showed 40 new tempera paintings. It was then that she received the highest praise for her art from Arthur Elek. After the German occupation in March 1944, persecution awaited her and her family. In 1945 he joined the Hungarian Communist Party and became a member of the Art Workers' Union. From October to November 1946, she organized a collective exhibition of her works at the Fészek Klub. In May 1948, the Free Association of Hungarian Artists organized a collective exhibition of her work in the old Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle).

The life of Gitta Gyenes and her family in the ghetto was one of forced labour, hiding and constant fear. It was during this period - 1944-45 - that she produced her famous series of Antifascist drawings, authentic documents of the time. The drawings evoke the spirit of terror, of hiding, fear, deportation and finally liberation and peace. Each drawing is an experience of the artist. In 1947, Gyenes drew her series 'The Negro is Human', a protest against of racial discrimination. On these pages, Gyenes does not depart from her established painterly style, but re-tunes it to a graphic language reduced to monochrome and its tones. In both series of prints, she also creates a sense of perspectival depth, so that her figures live and move in three-dimensional space, but remain almost disembodied. She achieves this effect both by using the dry-brush technique and by the absence of sharp and defined contours around the objects and human figures created from splintered patches.