Portrait of girl

The individual style of the Hungarian artist Béla Czóbel was formed through education and primarily outdoor painting experiences from three centres: the Nagybánya (Baia Mare) artistic colony in Romania (studies with Béla Iványi Grünwald), the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (studies in studios of Wilhelm von Diez and Ludwig Herterich) and Académie Julian in Paris (studies in the studio of Jean Paul Laurens). It gradually evolved under the impact of post-Impressionists, subsequently Fauvists and Jugendstil in order to transform in the spirit of German Expressionism while in the 1930s, it matched the convention of the École de Paris artists. Apart from landscapes, cityscapes and genre scenes in interiors, the basic part of his oeuvre are portraits. Czóbel spent some years of his life in Berlin (1919-1925), where he became friends with Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. This is also the period when the “Portrait of a Girl in the Red Beret” purchased for the collection of the pre-war Municipal Museum in Szczecin derives. The painting was made with bold strokes of the brush and clear emphasis on the painter’s gesture. The flat spots of intensive colours were clearly delimited with dark contours. The Szczecin work is a part of the group of Czóbel portraits where paintings of the French Fauvists and the German Expressionists from Die Brücke circle, already processed by the artist, are clearly resounding.

Dariusz Kacprzak