Lover of reality - painting by Béla Czene

In the last decade, Béla Czene's painting became the center of attention again. Although he achieved success between the two world wars, in the decades following 1945, official art criticism treated his art as a stepchild. Between 1930 and 1933, he studied as a student of Gyula Rudnay at the Academy of Fine Arts, but he soon turned away from his master and was more influenced by the works of artists belonging to the Roman school. In 1938, he was able to work in Rome for almost a year with a state scholarship. The influence of the Roman Hungarian neoclassical style and the contemporary Italian Novecento can be felt in his works made in Italy, but he was mostly inspired by the classical tradition of the Renaissance, primarily the works of Ghirlandaio and Piero della Francesca. After his return home, his artistic interest increasingly turned towards peasant culture, instead of the earlier mythological and biblical depictions, he depicted the everyday life of the village in his pictures. In the 1950s, like his fellow artists, he too was forced to adapt to the social realist style demanded by the authorities, but at the end of the decade he spoke in his own voice. A new pictorial world unique to him was formed, the center of which is the everyday life of the modern urban man, his typical scenes and characters, the classically derived, yet modernized female beauty. No one captured the atmosphere of the 1970s and 80s more sensitively than him, his pictures almost essentially condense the feeling of life and visual culture that is usually denoted by the word retro. The author of the volume is Péter Molnos, who wrote the monographs of Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry, Gyula Derkovits, Vilmos Aba-Novák and Count Gyula Batthyány, among others. The representative album, designed by Árpád Fákó, presents Béla Czene's undeservedly overlooked oeuvre, waiting to be discovered, on 460 pages, with reproductions of around 400 works of art, in a language that can be consumed by the general public as well as by academic requirements. The volume was published with four types of covers.