Village (1907)

In the early 1900s, Géza Faragó became known primarily as a poster designer, who learned his craft and developed it to an artistic level in Paris with no less a name than Alfons Mucha. It was not until 1910, when he held a large-scale exhibition at the National Salon, that the public became acquainted with his painting. On this occasion, Géza Lengyel wrote in the Nyugat: 'One could almost say: the other Géza Faragó has appeared here, the one who does not work on commission, does not dress up a commercial advertisement in a pleasing form, but is simply the painter, the observer of tugboats, of windows with geraniums, of flowery courtyards ... The importance of his exhibition is to bring out this spontaneous creative side of the artist and to prove that he is worthy of attention in his entirety. Among his pictures are honest, well-observed copies of nature, there are some not always happy mixtures of the real and the imagined, the stylised, but there are also subtle, nobly simple pieces that excel with few tools, that say a lot in few words, one would think that this austerity is enhanced in his posters and, after his better landscapes, is almost surprising, that his works are often overloaded with details, he who, in a landscape, confines himself to the minimum of colour, and virtuosity sometimes overwhelms the stylist, but this virtuosity is then excellent, and the exhibition is a great success, many people staring after the poster designer discover the painter, without whom they had no idea, and without whom the designer-artist could not exist'. 

Faragó's favourite painting subjects were sunny village courtyards, which, like the posters, are highly stylised, only here the simplicity, the flatness of the lowland landscape and the geometric shapes of the houses justify it. Faragó counterpoints this linearity with the lacy foliage of the trees, sparkling in different shades of green.