Art
ISTVAN SZEGEDI-SZOTS. AT GIEVES GALLERY.
HUNGARIANS are traditionally a people of vehement tem- perament, and their land and climate arc exposed to violent extremes : bleak parching winter, spring coming with a riot, and summer almost a maddening blaze. Mr. Szegedi-Sz•.ts, the young artist whose work is now showing at the Gieves Gallery, makes us feel these things, and feel also his need and his power for vehement expression. His colour will seem to most of us crude and glaring, and it is easier to come at him through the black-and-white, in which he excels. There are five or six sketches, each containing a few bold broad strokes, but so distributed that the picture is filled— a fine example of perfect spacing. One shows a single figure, Alone (No. 44) ; another next it even better, called Sun Worshipper, is a gesture of adoration. Three others even more economical in means give a couple of horses drinking greedily in summer from a bucket by a tip-well : a team of boatmen hauling as in the Volga boat song --and the rhythm is accentuated by two slender trees, vaguely suggested, which swing the other way. The third is a street in winter, a cart and the long-horned ox in its shafts—but how the wind is felt in its bleakness.
When one has got used to these, it is easier to look at the whirl of nude figures in conventionalized colour by which he conveys the rush and flight of raiders and the Seine women, or the emergence of spring. or the drunkenness of summer. We learn to overlook the harshness of tones in his mother and child, and to see what he has given—the very rapture of young maternity. There are also in his detached studies many significant heads, verging on caricature, yet not going beyond expressive- ness. But best of all is, perhaps, the most important large work in colour : oxen straining irresistibly forward uphill with the golden weight of a harvest wain behind them.
S. G.
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