Barki Gergely et al.: Czóbel. A French Hungarian painter - ArtMill publications 5. (Szentendre, 2014)
Mimi Kratochwill: Béla Czóbel's mature period, 1925-1976
254. Michel Kellermann, around 1926, PRIVATE COLLECTION 255. Michel Kellermann and Czóbel’s painting of him, 1995. The author’s photograph 8 According to sources, it was here that Modigliani, who was Czóbel’s nextdoor neighbour in the Cité Falguidre artists’ colony, sold Czóbel one drawing after the other. Czóbel later mentioned several times that he had helped Modigliani from the money he had put together, but Modigliani resented him not giving him a bit of change more often, even though he frequently sat next to him. in the boy’s childhood, in 1926. In the composition the figure of the little boy sitting in a chair and wearing a hat fills almost the whole canvas. The lights flicking in the background, and the yellowish browns and somewhat less of greens are repeated on the boy’s white shirt, whose gaze is one of intelligence. The artist used this tool - as he did in other portraits he had painted of children - to express how close he felt to young people. He painted a characteristic portrait of the older Michel Kellermann, too, and maintained close ties with him, by then an acknowledged Derain-expert, for the rest of his life. The two can be seen in photographs marking numerous events in their lives, while their continuous correspondence attests not only to their organizing exhibitions but also to meeting as friends. Right until the end of Czóbel’s life, Michel Kellermann was his link to the French cultural life. Kellermann sent Czóbel accounts of Paris, as well as French art magazines and daily papers, even when Czóbel was no longer able to participate in French artistic life. One of the photographs that have survived shows the Kellermann family sitting on the terrace of the Dome Café, and Czóbel appearing by the next table in the company of the painter Lajos Tihanyi.8 At that time a French newspaper dubbed Czóbel an “old Parisian” (“un vieux párisién”), despite the fact that the artist never became a French citizen. Of the most prestigious galleries, for example, Bernheim-Jeune invited him to their exhibition entitled Couleurs (Colours), where he displayed his works alongside those by Marc Chagall, Marcel Gromaire and André Lhote. The reviews published about the exhibition emphasized the enormous role colours played in Czóbel’s art, one of the artist’s strengths. A painting made in Hatvan, the Watering Girl Watering in Greenhouse, was included at the Nineteenth Venice Biennial (Plate 240). 160 CZÓBEL, A FRENCH HUNGARIAN PAINTER
