An Enigmatic Hungarian Painter in Paris – Géza Szóbel (1905–1963) – A selection from the collection of Kalman Maklary

We celebrate the 120 th anniversary of the birth of Géza Szóbel (1905–1963), a painter of Hungarian birth who was active in Paris, with a minor retrospective of his life’s work, jointly presented by the Ferenczy Museum Centre of Szentendre and the Kalman Maklary Fine Arts Gallery.
Born in Komárno into a Jewish family, the artist studied in his native town, as well as in Budapest, Berlin and Prague, and around 1928–29, he was already working in the art capital of the continent, Paris, where he made his home in 1934. He soon became associated with the Cubists, Surrealists and the artists of the École de Paris, and these three inf luences were to shape his art before the war. In 1937, he took part in painting a monumental mural that Sonia Delaunay designed for the Palais de l’Air pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris. During the war, he served for six years in the Czechoslovak exile army in France and then in the United Kingdom. In England he published two series of drawings, Civilisation and The Star of David, which thematize the horrors of the war and the sufferings of the Jews, rendering human suffering and vulnerability with intense passion. Géza Szóbel’s entire family, who had remained in Komárno, fell victim to the Holocaust in 1944, and the artist never returned to his homeland after 1945.
After the war, his paintings, which employed a special, luminous scumbling technique, became more colourful, more open and increasingly abstract. At that time, his figures—warring angels, characters that bring to mind children’s drawings, compositions reminiscent of Gothic stained glass windows —were part of an ancient, mystical, and dramatic world, but from the mid-1950s onwards, this melancholic visual language became increasingly abstract, relaxed, and dynamic. His last solo exhibition in Paris was still open when he died in the summer of 1963 at the age of 58.
As was the case with many of the immigrant artists of the second École de Paris, the life and work of Géza Szóbel sunk into near oblivion after his death. His paintings were dispersed in the 1970s, his work was not studied by art historians. A multi-ethnic artist and a cosmopolitan who considered the whole of Europe his home, Szóbel did not receive the recognition he deserved in any of the countries he called his own. It was only in the 2000s that the art trade began to take notice of his works; in Hungary, the Kalman Maklary Fine Arts Gallery was the first to exhibit his paintings. This exhibition seeks to present a promising and exciting but forgotten œuvre of French modernism in a museum setting, by reconstructing the chronology of his life and by finding his dispersed works.

This exhibition is jointly presented by the Ferenczy Museum Centre and the Kalman Maklary Fine Arts Gallery.