Progressive Endeavours in the Interwar Period
In the second half of the 1920s, a group of "progressive young artists" was formed by students at the Academy of Fine Arts. The exhibition of their works, which were inspired by cubism and constructivism and used the techniques of montage and collage, caused such outrage (Lajos Vajda, Sándor Trauner) that they and their teachers were forced to quit the Academy. In 1930, the group's members, including not only Vajda and Trauner but also Dezső Korniss and György Kepes, joined the so-called Munka (meaning Labour) circle, headed by Lajos Kassák, and they later emigrated, returning only after a lengthy period of time, if at all. After Vajda and Korniss returned, they settled in Szentendre, where they began to create a new visual vocabulary using the varied traditional motifs they discovered in the town and its surrounding area. They were not the only artists living in those days in this small town on the banks of the Danube. An artists' colony had operated there for years, where Jen Barcsay painted landscapes and monumental human figures constructed of geometric shapes. Jenő Paizs Goebel presented images of an idyllic, fairytale world, while a similarly archaising vernacular was employed in the wood carvings of his friend, Gyula Czimra.
The New Society of Artists (Képzőművészek Új Társasága, KUT) was established in the mid-1920s, grouping together those exponents of modern art who remained in Hungary. Members of the older generation, offering a sense of continuity, were joined by an increasing number of younger artists, and the works on show at their annual exhibitions reflected the lessons of all the different "isms", a typical example being Jen Gadányi’s compositions, built up of broad patches of colour. Some of the artists living abroad made it all the way to abstraction: in Paris in the mid-1930s, Hungarian members of the association of international artists known as Abstraction-Création included Lajos Tihanyi, who would spend the rest of his days here, and the much younger Ferenc Martyn. The art of Imre Amos, whose works featured regularly in the KUT exhibitions, grew ever more dramatic after the outbreak of World War I1, while the sufferings were also etched into the tormented forms of sculptures made by Dezső Bokros Birman and Tibor Vilt. After 1946, the two sculptors joined the short-lived "European School" which briefly united representatives of various modern movements. Another member was Erzsébet Forgách Hann, celebrated for her psychological portraits.
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