József Bartl – Motifs of Identity

The career of József Bartl (1932-2013) unfolded largely during the Kádár era, when the gradually loosening cultural political pressure allowed a limited amount of freedom for representatives of abstract art. Yet his art, characterized by the playfulness of motifs (heart, tulip, cross, human-shaped headstone, wedge, circle), was not determined by political attitudes. He focused on exploring his own inner world and looking for artistic modes of expressions with which he could identify. Bartl’s way of thinking was deeply rooted in the intellectual milieu of the early sixties that determined the vision of a new generation of artists, such as Ilona Keserü, as well as Imre Bak, Pál Deim, István Nádler and other artists of the Zugló circle. In addition to being influenced by the classical avant-garde masters (Braque, Klee, Matisse, Picasso), his art was embedded in the artistic tradition represented by Dezső Korniss and Lajos Vajda and, in a broader sense, the European School, which set out the directions of the history of post-war art in Hungary.

Bartl’s artistic identity was essentially shaped by the cultural environment associated with two places: Soroksár and Szentendre. He was born in Soroksár, in a German family, and Swabian culture remained a vital point of identification for him throughout his life. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts (1952-1959), he mostly painted still lives and portraits, in which elements of folk art and objects related to Swabian culture, such as the trumpet, played a central role. Although he had already experimented with abstract painting in the sixties, his move to the Old Art Colony in Szentendre (1972) marked a turning point in his art becoming more abstract and his use of motifs becoming more methodological. At Szentendre he became close to Jenő Barcsay, Dezső Korniss and Endre Bálint, as well as residents of the art colony, such as Béla Kondor and Károly Klimó, with whom he was admitted at the same time as the colony was being expanded. In his 1981 exhibition in the Kunsthalle Budapest, he exhibited only abstract works. Bartl’s unmistakable style of painting matured in the eighties and nineties was characterized by the dominance of the colour white and the combination of simplified folk art motifs.

The exhibition to be held in 2024 focuses on the forms of expression of Bartl’s artistic identity, which, in addition to drawing from the local motifs of Szentendre and Soroksár, are profoundly rooted in European modernism and post-war Hungarian painting.

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