Barki Gergely - Gulyás Gábor: Újragondolt Czóbel. A szentendrei Czóbel Múzeum állandó kiállítása (Szentendre, 2016)

381 Mária a kertben | Mária in the Garden 11963

39 I Szentendrei szobabelső | Interior in Szentendre 11960

Berlin, the bridge to Die Brücke (1919-1925)

In October 1919, he followed his wife, Isolde Daig, and his daughter, Lisa Czóbel, who had moved to Berlin. Just as he had joined the leaders of the avant-garde in Paris and Belgium, so in Berlin he became more and more closely associated with Die Brücke, the Expressionist group that can be considered the German counterpart of the French Fauves.

Paul Cassirer, who had followed his career since the beginning of the century, organized a solo exhibition for Czóbel the same year he moved to Berlin. He went on to be featured at solo and group exhibitions several times a year, both in Berlin and other German cities, often together with members of Die Brücke. In the upshot of these displays, more and more collectors showed an interest in his work; unfortunately, most of these collections still await rediscovery at unknown locations - provided that they survived the destructions of the Nazi period, when Czóbel’s work was also declared Entartete Kunst, or, "degenerate art.” Black and white reproductions of the dozens of lost works from the artist’s decorative-expressive Berlin period nonetheless prove that these years saw an output commensurate with the quality of his Fauvist period, important even by international standards. Fortunately, a few works did survive, including landscapes he painted during the summers he spent in Würzburg and its vicinity, a few Berlin scenes, and nudes and portraits he created in the studio, some of which are now parts of the core corpus of the Ferenczy Museum Center (Cover, Fig. 12,14-16).

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