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

Emőke Bodonyi: Czóbel's water colours and graphic works

175. Unknown artist: Gobelin based on Béla Czóbel’s graphic ofthe Shepherd Boy with Goat, no date. Szentendre, Ferenczy Museum

176. Béla Czóbel: Shepherd Boy with Goat, 1919. Szentendre, Ferenczy Museum

29 “no title [Female Portrait]”. In: Kállai, Ernő: Neue Malerei in Ungarn. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Bierman, 1925, Plate 46. Republished: Kállai, Ernő: Új magyar piktúra [New Hungarian Painting]. Budapest: Gondolat, 1990, p 120. It was mentioned as made in 1913, although below the signature the date 18 can be clearly seen.

30 Girl Head, signature below right: Czóbel / 26. KÚT, May 1926, p 10.

31 Genthon, István: “Új magyar rajzok [New Hungarian Drawings]”, Magyar művészet [Hungarian Art], 1934,

Vol. 10, No. 1, p 20.

32 Published in: Genthon: Czóbel (op. cit. in note i), p 7.

33 Ernő Kállai mentions ardently a Berlin street view staged already at the 1924 Belvedere exhibition: “Czóbel has a water colour painted on the most busy, and most complicated construction ofthe Hochbahn. It could have represented a village evening, so deep is the silence of tones and the vegetation of forms on this picture”. Kállai: Új magyar piktúra (op . cit. in note 29), p 122.

of representation is rough, a few robust black lines hold together the brownish surfaces covering the paper, the head with the weird hat and the bust. The Portrait of a Woman (1918), published in Ernő Kállai’s book is similarly easy, showing only the most characteristic features.29 Compared to these pieces, the Sitting Girl (Plate 151) from the Buchheim Museum brings a new way of expression, with loose colour patches of gouache, or the sensual Girl Head of 1926, published in the KÚT periodical among the listed work.30

Beside female portraits, nudes were also made in this time, with loose forms closed by a few thick colour contour lines. These portraits and nudes are not really attractive, the representation is increasingly free, the models have almost lost their personality. István Genthon might have written in connection with this that the artist “created a strange but attractive combination of opposites of purity and frightening freaky.”31 The model ofthe water colour Youth (Plate 192), finished in 1930, in the same year ofthe Muse (Plate 259), represent, however, the beauty ideal characterizing Czóbel’s art in the following decades.32

Here we have to discuss the place of water colour and the similar techniques in Czóbel’s career. István Genthon’s earlier cited statement on the equality of water colours with oil paintings from the point of view of size and concept is underlined by the listed works. Czóbel considered them as equivalents to paintings, only the possibilities offered by the material and technique were different, and he started working with the same seriousness as if it was an oil painting. In most of the cases even Ernő Kállai did not consider the technique ofthe work investigated, although he was mainly interested in oil paintings, still he directly mentioned a water colour of a Berlin street, primarily because of its concept of lacking the city bustle.33 The group of works representing cityscapes are from the German period, using pastel, tempera, charcoal together, reaching a fuller

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CZOBEL, A FRENCH HUNGARIAN PAINTER