Barki Gergely et al.: Czóbel. A French Hungarian painter - ArtMill publications 5. (Szentendre, 2014)

R. Stanley Johnson: Béla Czóbel

One reason for the lack of attention of the public is the intensely private nature of Czóbel’s persona.2 He showed his works to very few people and avoided almost all contact with art critics.

Czóbel’s painting, particularly with its special and unique sfumato, could not be relegated to a clearly defined artistic category. As a result, his art has not been able to benefit from the rise of interest in any particular art movement. This, combined with his nomadic existence (crisscrossing Europe), has made it difficult for art historians and critics to see the cohesiveness of his artistic achievement have placed him, at various times, in a variety of “schools”. For example, in 1924 in the First Universal German Exhibition presented in Moscow, Saratov and Leningrad (today St. Petersburg), there were works by Czóbel (as well as Bortnyik, Kádár, Moholy-Nagy and other Hungarians living in Germany). Classified as a “German School” artist, CzóbePs works featured prominently in the exhibition.3 Another obstacle to the greater recognition of czóbel has been the tendency, seen in the presentation of his works in Hungary, to concentrate on the artist’s native ties, rather than to show his place and contributions to contemporary European art as a whole. On the other hand, in museum exhibitions in Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam and Berlin, his work was associated with various local or national art scenes.

The author is standing by Béla Czóbel’s bronze figure in Szentendre.

Photo by Mimi Kratochwill

1 Matisse in particular respected Czóbel. Czóbel’s first exhibition took place in 1908 in Paris at the Galerie Berthe Weil, where Matisse had his first exhibition in 1907.

2 In spite of his very private persona, Czóbel seemed to find lots of time to be with my wife and myself, both on our visits to the Czóbels in Szentendre and in Paris where we lived just a few blocks away from each other. He was especially attached to our two little children whose portraits he drew incessantly. He also constantly asked for our thoughts on his latest paintings and was always happy to join us on the Boulevard de Montparnasse for a glass of wine at Le Dome, the Le Select, La Coupole or La Rotonde.

3 John E. Bowlt. Standing in the Tempest Painters of the Hungarian Avant-Garde 1908-1930, Santa Barbara, etc. 1991, p 155.

Additionally problematic is the continuing confusion between the “French School” and the so-called École de Paris. In principle, the former embodied primarily French-born artists working in France, artists such as Braque, Léger, Villon, Gleizes, Metzinger, Lhote and Gromaire.The School of Paris, on the other hand, consisted essentially of non-French artists, including Picasso, Chagall, Modigliani, Brancusi, Zadkine, Pascin, Soutine, Czóbel and others. The Expressionist nature of many Central European artists, including Chagall, Soutine and Czóbel, with their “messy painterliness”, harsh colouring and contortioned forms, showed little respect, however, for French school “discipline”, “sense of order” and “laws of harmony”. Their art was very different from École de Paris based on what the critic Waldemar George called “the secrets of the French sense of measure”.

Czóbel’s life took him many places in Europe, but at every point in his life as an artist, there was the ubiquitous spiritual presence of the Latin Quarter of his youth and somehow French artistic traditions. It is to Czóbel’s credit that in spite ofthat “presence” and influence of Paris, Czóbel spiritually and artistically remained very Hungarian.

The dynamic, rapidly changing nature of socio-cultural developments in the last century would not justify attempts to establish narrow or restricted categories in which to place a given modern artist, and his or her accomplishments. In the case of Béla Czóbel, his works have to be compared with those of his Hungarian contemporaries, and particularly “The Eight” (Berény, Czigány, Kernstok, Márffy, Orbán, Pór, Tihanyi and Czóbel), but at the same time with those of other European artists with related creative paths. Czóbel exerted a profound influence on the development of twentieth-century Hungarian art. However, he could not be categorized solely as an imio

CZÓBEL, A FRENCH HUNGARIAN PAINTER