Verba Andrea: Paizs Goebel Jenő (1896–1944) (Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, 1996)

Jenő Paizs Goebel was born in Budapest on 4 July 1896. Until his death on 23 November 1944 he achieved great success both in Hungary and abroad. His peculiar, richly picturesque works abundant in symbols have been discovered by the profession as well as the public from time to time. Jenő Paizs Goebel was first Tivadar Zemplényi's, then István Réti's pupil at the Academy of Fine Arts, between 1916 and 1924. His career started promisingly: having finished his studies at the academy he travelled to Paris on the Nemes Marcell Scholarship and on the honorarium of his landscape bought by Elek Petrovics for the Museum of Fine Arts. He spent one and a half years in the French capital and the nearby Barbizon until December 1925. After his return home in 1926 he worked at the Artists' Colony of Nagybánya (Transylvania) for a short time. The artist's early works of the 1920s show the signs of Neoclassical school. At this time he was influenced mostly by István Szőnyi's paintings. In Paizs Goebel's works "the compositions built on light-shadow contrast emphasizing the plastic mass of bodies" were completed with expressive features partly recalling the constructivism of Cubism. One of the most important works of the period is the painter's picture titled Saint Sebastian (Self-Portrait) from 1927, which was exhibited at the Hungarian exhibition in Rome in the following year. Jenő Paizs Goebel was one of the eight painters who established the Society of Szentendre Painters in January 1928. From this time on the artist worked mainly at the artists' colony of Szentendre as well as in his studio in Budapest. At the international fine arts exhibition of the World Expo of Barcelona in 1929 he won a silver medal. It was in the first half of the 1930s that the painter's individual style characterized by decorative colours and symbols inspired by metaphysical impulses matured. The ars poeticalike, summarizing works of the period are Golden Age (1931), Art (1931) and Life (1932). The early subjects - nude, landscape and self-portrait transformed, and they often returned combined with each other in new forms. In this period besides the self-portrait referring back to the painterly role and combined with a more and more abundant motif-system the other important subject of the oeuvre is the expressive jungle picture considered as the projection of an inner, spiritual landscape (In the Jungle, Ci vet-Cat, 1930), which can be related to Henri Rousseau's jungle compositions. During the 1930s, apart from the works reflecting on the artist's identity and the jungle pictures significant art pieces were created by him in the genre of landscape as well (Trees in Blossom, 1931; Winter, 1932; Small Bridge of Szentendre, 1934). In his last period Paizs Goebel represented mostly the landscape of Szentendre and the everyday life of the town. His sight-paintings of lyrical mood offer an expressive compound of observed and known things. At the same time his works are more and more saturated with the "irrepressible feeling of anguish rising everywhere". His art and his world concept can be paralleled with epochal trends in this respect as well. Through his work - which created an individual synthesis of progressive European trends - he became a significant character of Hungarian art between the two world wars.