Most of the Nagybánya painters were influenced by Károly Ferenczy from the early beginning, without reaching his artistic consciousness and technical knowledge. The standard that he represented was approached only by Béla Iványi Grünwald.
When he was in Munich, Béla Iványi Grünwald worked in the spirit of the Hollósy circle and conveyed the themes inspired by the contemporary naturalistic literature with mother-of-pearl coloured tones: Nihilists drawing lots. The second version of the Warlord's Sword, which was begun in the Bavarian capital, but finished in Transilvania, represents the most clearly how much the atmosphere of Nagybánya influenced his artistical methods. On this picture, he succeeded in rendering the violet-green-yellow vapor of the sunshine, which vibrates on the clouds after the storms in summer.
Beginning with 1902, he worked as a teacher of the now officially founded Nagybánya Independent Painters' School. Besides this, he tried to renew the historical painting as well: Between Crags. Nevertheless, on these pictures the surroundings of Nagybánya are not only the background of the costumed figures. The nature and the figures bathed in sunlight that appear in it form an organic construction; they are equivalent pictorial elements.
In 1903, like Ferenczy, he too discovered the colour-transforming quality of the radiant daylight. He used little brush-strokes to capture the light that sets in motion, dissolves the surface and has a vibrating effect: Spring Excursion, Watering, Drying Clothes.
A few years later he was painting large, decorative, homogeneous planes: View of Nagybánya with Gutin. He served as a rallying point for the "neos", those younger artists, who looked past the increasingly established Nagybánya approach and were interested in the modern tendencies that took over in Western Europe. He left Nagybánya after 1907 and became the leader of the Kecskemét colony.
István Csók, who belonged to the circle of the friends of Nagybánya painters in Munich and Paris, joined the colony only temporarily. Several threads tied him to the Nagybánya School in the course of his long career that meandered from historical naturalism to a sun-bathed plein-air painting and mystical symbolism. The three summers spent at the Nagybánya colony (he was there between 1897 and 1900, didn't have a direct influence on his style, but it had a greater effect on the painterly methods used in his subsequent works.
He chose the dissolved, sunlighted solution of plein-air beginning with 1900: In the Sheephold, Gypsies Making Trough. At the same time, he was occupied with commercial, academic themes as well: Vampires. He moved to Paris in 1903 and his pictures became lighter, fresher, and brighter under the influence of the modern French painters. He melded the lessons learned from impressionism with the rich colorist palette of Hungarian folk art: Chest with Tulips. The environment that surrounded him in Budapest and his daughter inspired the most honest and personal works of his oeuvre. The style of the optimistic, colorful Züzü serial is sometimes impressionistic: Züzü with Cock; Züzü under the Christmas Tree.
His oeuvre is one of the most optimistic phenomenons of Hungarian art, but it is too bad that he wasn't concerned with deeper contextual, formal, intellectual matters.