In the Depths of Perception •

Abstract

This is a monographic study of the art of István Nagy, a painter of Transylvanian origin, whom his contemporaries also called the “Hungarian Van Gogh” due to his insociable nature and spectacular colours. István Nagy really had Van Gogh as kindred spirit, but his unique, nowhere classifiable and extremely prolific oeuvre consists mainly of a series of pastels, which not long ago for the first time managed to be collected in a monumental oeuvre catalog. The nearly 600-page album, edited by Tamás Kieselbach, provides an insight into the life of this strange, reticent, poor painter wandering in the mountains of Transylvania, who, like the composer Béla Bartók, created an independent formal language from his folk collection. In his fantastically coloured wild pastels and monochrome black charcoal drawings, he captures the ornamentation of the landscape and the closed world of ordinary peasants, which grew into a monumental one, in the footsteps of Millet and Seurat, but also utilizing the lessons of Hungarian modernism.