Barki Gergely - Gulyás Gábor: Újragondolt Czóbel. A szentendrei Czóbel Múzeum állandó kiállítása (Szentendre, 2016)
Gergely BÁRKI Curator CZÓBEL — THE CHANGING "CONSTANT” A seminal figure of Hungarian painting with an international prestige, Béla Czóbel (1883- 1976) influenced the development of his native country’s art almost from the beginning of his career, in a manner already recognized by his own contemporaries. Along the way, he left his impression in several of the centres of European modernism. The main stages of his early career: Nagybánya, Munich, Paris, Belgium (1902-1906) In the summer of 1902, the fresh grammar school graduate went to Nagybánya (today, Baia Mare, Romania), the heart of plein-air naturalism in Hungary, where he started to work under the guidance of Béla Iványi Grünwald. In the autumn of the same year he enrolled at academy of Munich, but was to be disappointed by the conservative training programme. After returning to Nagybánya for the summer of 1903, he continued his studies in painting at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he was to win the school’s nude competition the next year. Following this short period of preparation, he almost immediately reached the vanguard of French progression. From 1905, he regularly presented works at the exhibitions of the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. In the summer of 1905, there came an interlude in this period of going back and forth between Paris and Nagybánya (1902-1906), when he travelled to Belgium, and worked for months in picturesque Bruges, Zeebrugge, and Heist-aan-Zee. At the time he still adhered to what he had learned in Nagybánya, while also trying to find his way in the maze of what were new trends for him, fortified by what he had seen in Paris. In the spring of 1906, he presented several of the works he painted in Belgium, along with new ones he made in Paris, at the Salon des Indépendants. They were his first works to be informed by post-impressionism (Fig. 5). Still in the spring of 1906, following a short stay in Budapest, he returned to Nagybánya, where he had his latest works sent after him. The instructors and young artists of the colony were practically shocked by the unprecedented, raw power of the vividly vibrant colours, which were hemmed in by strong contours; by the simplicity of the figures, which were abstracted to the point where they resembled those of posters; and by the unusual wildness of the palette. Today, it is already difficult to understand why the trainers of the artist colony were scandalized by these discreetly modern works, the products of experimentation that had barely crossed the limits of post-impressionism and neo-impressionism. 23 I Czóbel önmagát és párizsi modelljét fotózza | Czóbel's photograph of himself and his parisian model 1925 körül I around 1925 2.1
