Self-portrait (Around 1920)

Béla Uitz is one of the greatest figures of Hungarian activism. He attended the College from 1908. After 1912 he developed his constructive-expressive style, which created a school movement. From 1915, he was one of the leading figures of the artists' guild that grouped around TETT and then MA, and for a time he was co-editor of the MA magazine with Lajos Kassák. In 1916 his prints won a gold medal at the San Francisco International Exhibition.  In the summer of 1916, he worked at the Kecskemét Artists' Centre, and in 1919 he was a member of the Art Directorate and head of the Proletarian Art Workshop. After the fall of Communism, he emigrated to Vienna with the Kassaks. In 1921, after a short stay in Berlin, he travelled to Moscow, took part in the Third Congress of the Comintern, became acquainted with Russian Constructivism. In 1922 he broke with Kassák and Aladár Komját, edited the journal Unity, published it in Hungarian, commenting on Russian constructivist manifestos.  

Uitz was influenced by the expressive, monumental ink drawings of his friend József Nemes-Lampérth, which launched his avant-garde career. He was influenced by the art of Goya, Cézanne, Picasso and the exhibitions of the Eight. His works from the mid-1910s form a transition between the stylistic intent of the Eight, Lampérth and the dramatic constructivism of the Hungarian cubists (Galimberti, the young Kmetty). He regarded Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Greco, Goya, Rembrandt and Cézanne as his true masters. His fierce nature and expressive expression were best suited to the direct formal language of graphic art. In addition to his ink drawings, he also produced etchings around 1916, and his posters during the Soviet Republic are very well known. In 1920, he published eight sheets of zinc caricature folders in the expressive-classical style Versuche (Experiments).In 1921, his art in Moscow was decisively influenced by Rodchenko's linearism, the old Russian icon painting and Orthodox church architecture, the sight of which inspired him to create a powerful series of watercolours based on primary colours. In Vienna, he painted five large-scale so-called icon analyses in oil on canvas, and produced a series of linocut paintings, Analysis, in which he experimented with abstract spatial and formal relationships. He drew a series of expressive realist graphics, depicting the history of the British machine-wrecking movement, the Luddites. He started from geometric schematic drawings and developed them further in purple ink with expressive renderings of figures. Finally, he etched a series of 14 sheets on copperplate using a cold needle technique, which had a great influence on Hungarian graphic art, especially on the work of Gyula Derkovits. 

The technique of the Self-Portrait, now shown, suggests that it may have been made at the same time as the Experiments, and its style is characterised by a plastic, realistic, cubo-expressionist monumentality that Kassák called the new academicism. The iconicity is not only in the form of the picture, but also in the