A View from the bridge (1959)

Árpád Darvas studied at the College of Applied Arts for two years, then in 1947 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, where his masters were György Konecsni and Sándor Ék. He worked in almost every field of graphic design, designing posters, emblems, exhibition graphics, logos, coats of arms and book illustrations. His main clients were Mokép, Hungarhotels, the Pannónia Hotel and catering companies. In the 1960s, his posters were characterised by a stark, flat, symbolic language and restrained colours, which gave way to a modelling style of drawing that emphasised the use of graphite and depicted satirical scenes and figures. He was a member of the Papp Group and participated in all their exhibitions between 1963 and 1982. Since 1983 he has been involved in the work of the Békéscsaba Graphic Artists' Association.

In several interviews, Darvas has said that graphic designers in Hungary were in a privileged position from the 1960s onwards: on the one hand, because they were given greater freedom ideologically, they were freer to experiment in the direction of abstraction, op art or even pop art; on the other hand, because they earned more than the average intellectual. The sixties and seventies were the last golden age of unique film and advertising posters in Hungary, in which Darvas played a major role. He was one of the first to use overexposed, "burnt photos" on posters, and in the 1960s, along with György Kemény, he is associated with the appearance of Hungarian pop art film posters on the streets. He later moved towards surrealism and then began painting again in the early 1980s.

Darvas's work, A View from the Bridge, borrows the title from Arthur Miller's 1955 play, originally about moments of limit, moments where you can still stop, moments that could still be reversed. From the very end of the 1950s onwards, Darvas made several similar paper collages, but these were not known to the public of the time and explored the themes Miller had raised (such as the big city and the alienated individual, obsession, repressed emotions). Darvas is able to make all of this tangible through simple means. He cuts human figures resembling objects and machines out of paper, while he uses ink lines to capture spatial positions and structures.