Barki Gergely et al.: Czóbel. A French Hungarian painter - ArtMill publications 5. (Szentendre, 2014)
Gergely Barki: Czóbel from Paris to Paris 1903-1925
98. Lisa Czóbel with her Friend in Bergen, before 1919. Private collection 99. Béla Czóbel: Dutch Head (The Bust of a Dutch Woman), 1917. Szentendre, Ferenczy Museum 100. Béla Czóbel: Lisa, i9ios. Missing 74 Piet: De Bergense School en Piet Boendermaker kunstverzamelaar in Amsterdam en Bergen. Zwolle, 1997. Quoted in: Sterren 2000, p 203. 75 Special thanks are due to restorer Gyula Kemény, who, with his months of meticulous work despite the seemingly impossible task, brought to light again this previously unknown Czóbel work from the Netherlands. 70 CZÓBEL, A FRENCH H BERGEN Czóbel was forced to leave his Amsterdam home, because war refugees were moved into his studio. Still, the painter’s settlement in the seaside town of Bergen can hardly be seen as exile. Indeed, he found many friends there, a public understanding and accepting of his art, and a community of likeminded, progressive artists. The so-called Bergen school - actually, an artist colony - had a decisive significance in dutch artistic life. Not only Dutch artists (Else Berg, Arnout Colnot, Dirk Filarski, Leo Gestel, Mommie Schwartz, as well as Matthieu and Piet Wiegmann), but also those who arrived from abroad became integral to the colony’s life. Perhaps the French Cubist, Henri Le Fauconnier exerted the most influence. As the monographer of the topic and one of the Dutch collectors of Czóbel well expressed it in his book, “The Bergen School’s Expressionist style was characterized by deliberately rough forms, dark colours and a sort of Cubist influence.”74 This was only partially true of Czóbel during his years in Bergen, but it is certain that his residence there coincided with the colony’s flourishing, and we may easily state that it was one of the sunniest periods in his career, complete with masterpieces. In addition, it is worth noting, that from this period his most important works are exceptionally extant and not only known from reproductions as opposed to the products of the coming, ever more sparkling Berlin years. Among his landscapes, the Windmill in Bergen (Plate 101) still invokes the atmosphere of his Amsterdam copy of Ruisdael, built upon complementing cold blue and burning hot red; yet, he ‘hacks out’ the sight from nature with increasingly rough primitivism. As opposed to this, in the case of his 1917 work, Still-life in front of the Window (Plate 105), until now only known from a black-andwhite reproduction, he appears to conjure the Fauve-era patch system through a soft, subtle filter. Yet, the Vase on Chair still-life (Plate 107), painted one year later, is rather tied to Czóbel’s Neo- Primitivism and explicitly pays respect to his great predecessors, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Startlingly raw, coarse and audaciously bold in its primitivism is the portrait (Plate 108) discovered only during the preparation for our exhibition, having freed it from a suffocating coat of red paint on the back of the Vase on Chair.75 Now we can begin our research into this newly uncovered portrait - formulated with unforced sincerity, then ‘denied’ for some reason - presumably also painted in 1918. Who could be the model for the portrait - a resident native to Bergen or a fellow painter there? Czóbel also painted several portraits of the members of an intellectual circle formed around the Bergen School, attracting writers, poets, collectors and other thinkers. From the Bergen period, one of the strongest, most important works is a friend’s portrait which depicts an outstanding member ofthat world, the then young Dutch poet, Adriaan Roland Holst (Plate 113). We are aware that Holst was also preserved in a profile portrait, but it is not known to us, not even from reproduction. UNGARIAN PAINTER
