The art of obscured Hungarian painter Béla Czene (1911-1999) had several stages, from following the principles of the Roman school (the Hungarian version of Italian neoclassicism) and socialist aesthetics to depicting the everyday life of the 1960s and 1980s with its' fashion and characteristic urban landscape. The images of nude models occupied a special place in Czene's legacy. Most of them are portrayed in the Roman or Greek setting, tracing back to the artist's neoclassicist works.
Fig. 1. Self-portrait with nude (wikiart.org)
Fig. 2. In a café (newsbeezer.com)
Fig. 3. San-Gimignano (wikiart.org)
Fig. 4. The Street, 1978 (wikiart.org)
Fig. 5. Pedestrians, 1972 (newsbeezer.com)
Fig. 6. Kalotaszegi lanyok, 1943 (newsbeezer.com)
Fig. 7. Reading girl in a blue dress (wikiart.org)
Fig. 8. Anna (wikiart.org)
Fig. 9. Standing nude, 1978 (wikiart.org)
Successful Student
Béla Czene was born in a family of a portrait painter Béla Tivadar Czene and the draftsman Jolán Franciska Borza. Curiously, the artist's wife, son, and granddaughter are also painters. For a relatively short period, from 1930 to 1933, Czene attended the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where his mentor was Gyula Rudnay, who followed realism and post-impressionism. Already from 1932, Czene had been taking part in group exhibitions. Unlike his teacher, he preferred the neoclassicist style of the Roman school and won a scholarship from the Hungarian Academy in Rome, which started in 1928. The scholarship provided him an opportunity to stay in Rome in 1938-1939.
Leonardo da Vinci
A year earlier, he won the prize of the National Hungarian Society of Fine Arts. During his time in Rome and on, the artist was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and Domenico Ghirlandaio. After the Second World War, this influence got weaker as Czene preferred subjects from everyday life. Throughout his career, Czene held many solo exhibitions, and the last one happened in 1998, a year before his death. Some of his works are exhibited in the Hungarian National Gallery.
Fig. 10. Reading nude (conchigliadivenere.wordpress.com)
Fig. 11. Reading nude (conchigliadivenere.wordpress.com)
Fig. 12. Nude with drawings (wikiart.org)
Fig. 13. Nude with books (wikiart.org)
Fig. 14. Reading nude (conchigliadivenere.wordpress.com)
Fig. 15. Girl with brown hair (conchigliadivenere.wordpress.com)
Fig. 16. Reading nude, sketch (conchigliadivenere.wordpress.com)
Fig. 17. In The Espresso, 1972 (newsbeezer.com)
Fig. 18. Lying nude, 1976 (wikiart.org)
In Premium you can find, besides 35 additional images, an analysis of Czene's nude aesthetics, the neglect by critics that followed his success, and a description of a striking detail in one of his nude portraits referring to shunga art from the Edo period.
Click HERE for the influential erotic portfolios of the Hungarian artist Alex Székely
Sources: Wikipedia.org; wikiart.org; conchigliadivenere.wordpress.com; newsbeezer.com
