The Spring (1917)

Attila Sassy, also known as Aiglon ('eagle'), began his artistic studies in 1898 in Budapest at the private school of Károly Ferenczy. In Paris he attended Anton Azbe's art school, and in 1904 he went to Munich. In 1905 he worked at the art centre in Nagybánya. In 1906, he returned to his hometown of Miskolc, where he became a member of the art society grouped around Margit Kaffka, who was his lover at that time. In 1909 he produced a booklet of nine pages for the writer's volume Opium Dreams, which made him nationally known. Sassy's series of drawings may have influenced Lajos Gulácsy's painting The Dream of the Opium-Smoker and a work by Géza Csáth, which is a testament to the importance of the work. In 1906 he was a student at the Julian Academy in Paris, where he was taught by Jean-Paul Laurens and Lucien Simon. In 1908, he started at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied sculpture. He exhibited in Paris, and from 1910 he participated in the exhibitions of the Budapest Kunsthaus, which brought him great success. In 1910 he also exhibited in Miskolc, where the exhibition of more than 100 works was organised by the József Lévay Public Culture and Museum Association. 

Sassy's first period was characterised by a symbolist and Art Nouveau (Aubrey Beardsley), slim, idealised and often decadent forms, bizarre tones in colour, pastel-like muted colours and decorative elements. He favours mystical, allegorical themes, and his titles express Sassy's imagination in a way that is eloquent: e.g. "Magic", "Opium", "Salome", "Desire". The oil painting Spring (elsewhere May) is also an allegory. Allegory is a word of Greek origin. It means: to speak figuratively, figuratively. A kind of symbolic representation; the personification or pictorial representation of an idea or abstract concept by the consistent use of elements of a given system of signs. In the visual arts, many artists have imagined the allegory of Spring, from Sandro Botticelli to Jan Brueghel, Alfons Mucha or Salvador Dali. Sassy uses iconological traditions such as: the figure of a young naked woman resting her feet on a bunch of flowers, birds and water, which symbolise renewal and eternal movement.