GALIMBERTI Sándor
Kaposvár, 1883 – Budapest, 1915

Townscape (View of Nagybánya), ca. 1909

Of all the students who passed through the artists’ colony in Nagybánya (Baia Mare), Sándor Galimberti would end up distancing himself the most from plein-air naturalism. He and his wife, Val.ria D.nes, devised a unique language of painting that consisted of abstracted landscape elements, “structural” pictorial compositions that also incorporated the lessons of Cubism, and a conscious reduction of colour. His true schools were in Paris, where from 1907 onwards he exhibited at the shows of the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. In Nagybánya, Galimberti – similarly to Lajos Tihanyi and Sándor Ziffer – successfully employed the bird’s eye perspective of cityscapes favoured by the Impressionists and the Fauvists. His overhead views of the city, which unified several different perspectives, were mostly painted from Stephen’s Tower.
Galimberti painted a corner of the main square, with the Calvinist church and its steeple in the background, and the verdant slopes on the other side of the river Zazar further in the distance. As well as his adoption of the basic colours of the fauvist palette, there is a discernible shift towards the opportunities raised by creating a more abstract structure for the landscape.