About 1906 the former students of the art colony questioned the general validity of the principles of the Nagybánya school. They demanded an individual style (a kind of neoimpressionism). The "neos" made the first steps of distancing, then braking away from naturalistic painting. This led step by step to the birth of geometrical, then lyrical abstract painting.
The small artistical revolution at the colony was set off in 1906 by the fauvist paintings of Béla Czóbel, which were painted in Paris. Nevertheless, the style of the "neos" was probably born earlier, between 1904 and 1905 at Nagybánya. This fact could be confirmed by the works of Jenő Maticska, which are composed of big patterns of colour: Frost, On the Banks of the Zazar. The radiating, vigorous, colourful paintings of Czóbel culminated, strengthened the slowly evolving changes: Painters in Open-Air, Sitting Man.
Their works reflected their modern views when they left the surroundings of Nagybánya, which obviously held them back. The interiors, the corners of ateliers, some of their genre paintings and compositions with nudes having idyllic atmosphere, left behind the traditional naturalistic views to represent something really new, something similar to fauvism, cubism or even symbolism.
The "neo" feeling came through most directly in the rendering of interiors: Béla Czobel's Girl before Bed and Sitting Man, Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba's Still-life and Portrait of Sándor Ziffer, Géza Bornemisza's Still-life. These creations bring something new in the world of their colours and the system of their forms first of all. Nevertheless they could be considered revolutionary only in the terms of Nagybánya. They never intended to change the world around them; they never felt that something like that would be necessary. Their inner peace, their harmonic relationship with their environment made possible the birth of such equilibrated compositions. At the same time, this is what limited their further evolution. In contrast with the works of their contemporaries, which were filled with inner tension, they rendered the world in static pictures. A typical representative of this style is the View of a Street in Nagybánya by Lajos Tihanyi, which is composed of strong, clear spots of colour and winding, decorative, accentuated black contours. The calm, closed off, perfectly static picture irradiates the personality of the artist, even without his immediate presence. Tihanyi's pictures became much more tensed later, in the year of the First World War. Nevertheless, in the period of the "neos" the time for this had not yet come neither for him, nor for his colleagues.
The artist's interest in the exotic, marginal forms of life were shown by the appearance of the theme of the gypsies: Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba: Gypsy Models, Lajos Tihanyi: Gypsy Woman with Child.
Their portraits convey the types of their society in great variety. The figure or portrait of the young artist or citizen with pipe is an often chosen theme: Béla Czóbel: Self-portrait. These were born under the sign of the unbreakable unity of man and nature and the model was not accentuated as a personality, as an individual character. The personality appeared for the first time on the Study of a Man by Dezső Czigány. The man shown from the front is an existing character not a stage figure composed into the view.
In this period Béla Czóbel is the most original master. The model of the Sitting Man is put in the decoratively conveyed interior of the room in such an original way, that he draws the attention to himself, even if his personality is not accentuated by the painter. The bright red face of the Man with a Straw Hat, the surface of the picture composed with amazing ease of vague spots of colour show a culmination of view painting.