Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
1950 were thrown out by the jury. Certainly, his landscapes of the Balaton, those curious paintings constructed of colours refracted and dissolved in the light where man melts gently into the natural world around him instead of trying to break up its unity did not live up to Zhdanov's tenets of Socialist Realism. Egry cannot be forced into any accepted category: his art is both human in a peculiar way and Hungarian. He had had hardly any more luck at the beginning either. In the absence of the necessary financial means he dropped out of school and could not spend more than a few weeks in Munich either. His first, and for a long time only, supporter was Károly Lyka, who published his drawings in the newly launched Art in 1903, thus securing some little income for the young artist. In his Model Drawing School, Károly Ferenczy found Egry’s style insufficient in relation to that of the Nagybánya painters. And yet what raised these works above the average of Egry's time was their decorative, expressive and symbolic strength. While the state secretary had Egry's pictures removed from the 1922 exhibition of the Szinyei Society, some clear-sighted and sympathetic art critics discovered his merits, winning some buyers and collectors over to him with their favourable reviews. In 1927 he won the prize awarded by the Society to the best landscape. ■ "It'd ip ace and inanity that I care about" (Jőzieh Z$ry) 78
