Sándor digit

Sándor numeral (born May 5, 1880 in Eger , Austria-Hungary , † September 8, 1962 in Nagybánya , Romania ) was a Hungarian painter.

Life

Artistic beginnings

Sandor Zahl prepared for his art studies at a drawing school in Budapest .

Studied in Munich, 1904–1906

In 1904 he went to Munich , where he first enrolled at the art academy with the realistic genre painter Karl Raupp . He later switched to Anton Ažbe's school . There he learned "wet-on-wet painting", in which you can "paint in and correct" over and over again. It is suitable for spontaneous, spirited work. The constant alternation of light and dark, of light and shadow was also characteristic of Ažbe's painting at the time. Almost all of his students followed her. For some time he also studied with the Hungarian naturalistic artist Simon Hollósy , who ran a private painting school in Munich .

Paris, Gauguin and Matisse, 1906

Before he went to Paris, he was in Nagybánya with his friend Béla Czóbel . Up until that point in time, plein air , realistic and impressionistic style variants prevailed there . In Paris, Digit saw Gauguin's major retrospective and Matisse 's exhibitions . Both artists had a lasting influence on him. Gauguin was the reason for him to go to Brittany to work there for a few months. From now on his pictures are colorful and life-affirming. In terms of color, he followed the harmony laws of balancing basic and complementary colors. The illuminating light had overcome digit in his painting and treated shadows completely in the sense of Gauguin. When they returned, Czóbel, Digit and other Hungarian artists imported the innovations of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism from France and thus encouraged deviants within the school of Nagybánya, the so-called “Neos”, in their homeland. These developed into important pioneers for the avant-garde, so that Hungarian modernism began to form not in Budapest, but in rural Nagybánya. How much other Fauves made a lasting impression on him besides Matisse is illustrated by For example, his painting of the Transylvanian “Weekly Market in Nagy ” from 1912. The picture almost looks like a late reminder of Derain's “Regent Street” from 1906. The colored dots and lines in Derain's painting, which can still be derived from pointillism, have been transformed into Ziffer's painting into a completely unique style and hardly reveal their origin. It is the same with graphic color contours that limit individual, other color fields. In the way in which Zahl dissolves forms and reduces details in favor of a painting that only suggests the essential with a few brushstrokes, Zahl reveals himself as a modern painter who is at the height of his time.

Munch's forced perspective, around 1907

In his painting “Two Boys on the Street” , which was created around 1907, Digit is very clearly impressed by Edvard Munch's formal language , in that he uses this one motif component, the so-called. "Forced perspective" took over. Munch had developed this painterly formula, which at the latest became his trademark with his painting “The Scream” . With the “forced perspective”, the Norwegian seems to want to oppose the French contemporary trend of flat painting, with all his other borrowings from French art. Playing this set piece of surface against perspective, which can be traced back to Munch, fascinated the painters of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München at the same time as Digit . Werefkin and Jawlensky evidently first dealt with this artistic problem several times in their paintings and sketches. A little later, Kandinsky , Münter and other artists from the circle were supposed to study the “forced perspective” as a characteristic of the motif and incorporate it into their repertoire. The Norwegian had come across van Gogh and Gauguin at an early age, had found his own expressive style building on them and now influenced Digit as well. Digit not only leaned on Munch in terms of motifs, but also adopted the matt color of the surfaces, which he surrounded with generous, sweeping lines, true to his model. Digit modified Munch's “forced perspective” with his painting “Two Boys on the Street” . He created the suggestion of spatial depth in the foreground as a surface through a sharp shortening of the path, the edges of which initially quickly aligned at a point behind the boys . However , he obscured a strictly central perspective view from a bird's eye view by zigzagging the path around a building into the background. This compositional element is particularly common in 19th century Japanese woodcut art. In addition to Munch's painting, it was obviously much earlier than most of Munich's avant-garde artists.

Berlin and Munich, 1910–1918

Tomb of Sándor Digit in Baia Mare

From 1910, Digit also worked in Berlin , in the same year he married the Berlin painter Käthe Beckhaus . In 1913 he opened a painting school in Munich, which was closed at the beginning of the First World War: he stayed with his wife in Germany before finally returning to Nagybanya in 1918.

After the First World War

After differences between the “Neos” and the plein air generation of the Nagybánya School in 1911, various artists were excluded from the artists' association. Digit was not affected by this measure and was able to influence young painters with his expressive style even after the First World War. In the 1930s he took up suggestions from Cubist painting , but the vital colors always remained the determining element of his painting. Later, 1935–1945, he worked as an art teacher.

literature

• Istvan Borghida: Sandor digit . Bucharest 1980
• Géza Csorba: La rôle de l'École de Paris dans la peinture hongroise . Paris 1986

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ZB, paragraph Sandor, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 131
2. ^ Lovis Corinth, The Learning of Painting, Berlin 1909, p. 57
3. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, p. 47 ff
4. ↑ ZB, paragraph Sandor, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 131
5. ↑ ZB, paragraph Sandor, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 131
6. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Vorfeld des Expressionismus, Anton Ažbe and painting in Munich and Paris, Wiesbaden 1988, fig. 34
7. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, In the run-up to Expressionism, Anton Ažbe and painting in Munich and Paris, Wiesbaden 1988, fig. 28.
8. ^ Emil Maurer , Munch: Motive of the picture direction, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14./15. November 1987, p. 65.
9. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, p. 126 ff.
10. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Vorfeld des Expressionismus, Anton Ažbe and painting in Munich and Paris, Wiesbaden 1988, p. 22.
11. ↑ Bernd Fäthke, Jawlensky and his companions in a new light, Munich 2004, p. 129.
12. ↑ ZB, paragraph Sandor, in exh. Cat .: Paths to Modernism and the Ažbe School in Munich, Museum Wiesbaden 1988, p. 131