Still life with book (1961)

Gruber essentially revived the Cézanne tradition in his dramatic intensity, but he was also influenced by Van Gogh and his masters Aurél Bernáth and János Kmetty. He developed a style of painting that was both figurative and highly emotional. "He was an extremely material painter, who kneaded the paint like clay, his paintings are literally material entities, his works are objects. His paintings have objects, stark, hard objects, masses and contrasts of masses, heavy material colours. His world was not one of transparency, but of solidity, of massiveness", writes Lajos Németh about him. At the beginning of the 1960s, when Béla Gruber's works were being produced, Hungarian art was just emerging from the crisis of dogmatism and schematism in our fine arts. At that time, this innovative, figurative art was outlining a new, viable path in painting, a path that could have pointed towards a possible solution in the present era of stylistic search. 

Both the subject matter and the colouring of Still Life with a Book suggest the influence of Cézanne and Bernath, with deep fiery colours interwoven with a predominance of purple and blue. A tribute passed down from generation to generation, since Bernáth painted a still life with a Cézanne book in 1945. Gruber, on the other hand, does not depict the windowed corner of his apartment, but transposes his still life into his own world, his studio, among the objects (books, fruit, painting utensils) that are familiar from his other paintings. Gruber often left many of his works unfinished, which shows his constantly tormented, self-destructive state of mind.

In 1946, the National Aid sent him to Halas in the countryside, and from 1949 he went to study at the Plant Production and Animal Husbandry Technical College in Kőszeg together with his twin brother. He left school at the end of the first year. In October 1952 he started working at the shipyard in Óbuda, where he ended up in the decoration department. In the meantime he painted and drew diligently. He passed the entrance examination for the second time and was accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of János Kmetty and Aurél Bernáth. He died in 1963, just 27 years old, before completing his studies. The oeuvre is the fruit of his last three years, so to speak. Still lifes, studio still lifes, largely sketches for his thesis, a series of sculptural dramatic self-portraits and the garden of the hospital where he spent his last years. His unfinished diploma work, The Painter's Studio, is one of the outstanding compositions of contemporary Hungarian art. It depicts the focus of his life, his studio, and condenses the moments of the world around him with individual symbols.