Schmoll paste (around 1928)

Sándor Bortnyik owes his artistic debut to commercial graphics. He was not even 18 when he received his first poster commission from the Reményi Bazaar in 1910. The Savoly perfume company then invited him to Budapest to work for them. Between 1913 and 1915, Bortnyik studied intermittently at the Kernstok-Vaszary-Rippl-Rónai Free School, where he was most influenced by Kernstok, one of the member of the artistic group, the Eight. In 1917, he met Lajos Kassák and became involved with the MA magazine. He took part in exhibitions at Ma and regularly published the journal's work. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, he followed Kassák to Vienna. In 1921, his MA-Album was published, which Kassák regarded as the par excellence of 'pictorial architecture' and praised as the programmatic work of Hungarian Constructivism. In 1922 Bortnyik moved to Weimar to make contact with the Bauhaus, and in 1922 and 1923 he showed his works in Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery in Berlin. In 1925 he had an exhibition at the Mentor bookshop in Budapest. 1925-1926 he was one of the founders of the absurd theatre, the Green Donkey. In 1928 Bortnyik founded his private school of graphic design, called Műhely, where he taught according to Bauhaus principles. In 1933, he published his own magazine, Plakát (Poster).

In his first period in Budapest, Bortnyik's works (in theme and spirit) reflect the aspirations of the Eight. Shortly afterwards, as one of the most talented members of the Hungarian activist movement, he combined the stylistic features of Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism in his own individual way. In his woodcuts, he used the simplest means of cubist resolution of the view, using black and white blotch contrast and concentric composition to achieve a dynamic effect even on a small scale. Only a few oil paintings from this period are known or survive, but they are all the more important. Bortnyik's ability for emblematic compression is demonstrated in his oil paintings and activist posters, in which he synthesises avant-garde isms to create symbols of important motifs of the European left (e.g. locomotive, red paint, factory, worker, five-pointed star, flag, etc.). In his emigration to Vienna, Bortnyik's Ma-album inspired Kassák to develop his program of pictorial architecture. At this time, Bortnyik was creating works that analysed the relationship between geometric forms and colours, and then, under the influence of the Bauhaus, he moved increasingly closer to Constructivism and Functionalism. In his second period in Budapest (from 1925 to around the early 1930s), he expressed in his paintings the ambivalent relationship between modern society and the modern world in a satirical tone. From this point on, he was able to make excellent use of the methods of functionalist graphics and isms in his advertising graphics. In the 1930s, the lighter, flatter, decorative forms of Art Deco became more prominent in his painting and design work.

By the time the Budapest Workshop (1928-1938), also known as the "Hungarian Bauhaus", was established, Bortnyik had an extensive network of contacts. The idea was that the private school would have followed the Bauhaus model, "teaching painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre art and applied graphics in a unified spirit" (Bakos, p. 129), but unfortunately neither the financial nor the human conditions were there. Nevertheless, a spirit of progressiveness and modernity defined the main profile of the school, advertising and poster graphics. In the Nagymező Street apartment, Bortnyik was the main teacher, and many great graphic artists (e.g. Victor Vasarely, Klára Spinner, Gyula Macskássy, Ata Kandó) were trained under his tutelage. Bortnyik is credited with the emergence of the modern formal language in our everyday visual culture, and his superb compositional solutions, his great sense of decorativeness and his highly legible letters had an almost incalculable influence on the whole of its further development.With his many Modiano posters from 1928-1931, he pioneered the use of Bauhaus lettering and form in posters, which quickly influenced all types of advertising graphics and even typography. It was particularly important - also in functional terms - to make the image, text and colour as concise as possible. 

For Bortnyik, art and applied graphics cannot be separated. On Schmoll's pasta enamel billboard, Bortnyik is able to arrange the relatively long text with excellent compositional skills, while also using the tools of visual language to convey the message. The brand name is emphasised in two ways, firstly by using the old trademark, which is a visual reference to the fact that Schmoll pasta has been used since 1888. It is also red, enlarged and in a modern font. The letter is as essential and unchangeable a part of the composition as any other element of the poster. He uses few colours, red, yellow, blue and black and white, which are typical of the colour palette of Constructivist abstract paintings. More unusually, Bortnyik also uses movement and transition here, alongside large, homogeneous patches of colour, which may suggest that animated sketches were made for Schmoll's advertisements, which were shown in cinemas at the time.