István Szőnyi appeared before the greater audience in the 1919-1920 Winter Exhibition of the Budapest Art Gallery, and the picture that he put on display here met with unexpected success, as it was awarded the first grand prize of the freshly established Szinyei Society. He had painted the Double Portrait during the war in Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania) the colony he visited twice on his leaves as a soldier (he had been enrolled while at college). The painting was made during his earlier stay in Nagybánya in 1917, and it depicted two of his fellow students, Jolán Szilágyi and Román Petrovics. His brushwork reflects the influence of the Nagybánya masters' first generation: the faces lighted up from a low-keyed background are reminiscent of the softly rendered naturalistic portraits of intimate atmosphere made by Ferenczy and Réti. Nevertheless, Szőnyi's artistic emphasis is not on the characterisation of the persons sitting for the artist, as the figures of expressive gestures and soulful faces are lifted off, away from the specific situation and the solemn, but intimate double portrait is bursting with spiritual content, as underlined by the landscape background imbued in soft dim lights. This first valuable piece of the œuvre is a predecessor of the artworks painted in the first half of the twenties in many respects, and is also the opening piece of a series of future double portraits. Most of Szőnyi's paintings of similar cut and setting are double self-portraits, and in another one of his early works he depicted himself beside his friend, Jenő Pászk (Eugen Pascu) - again two artists in one painting. Szőnyi liked to construct his pictures based on pairs of contrast, and this method of construction was used in these pictures, too. The symmetrically arranged figures of differing habits of the Double Portrait are still in balance, while in the other picture the contrast effect is dominating: behind the male figure in a passive posture, who is sitting in the front, Szőnyi's figure can be seen rising high, throwing his head back, pointing with his left arm to his friend, as he is appearing from the background to which his figure had withdrawn. The complex setting of the directions and the vectors of hands and fingers and gazes is the same in the two pictures, and the static, restful compositions are constructed from a web of vertical and horizontal straight lines. The persons depicted are embodiments of friendship and artistic profession all at the same time, however later on the "second self" in the double portraits will be taken over by family members, instead of the friends.
In the early paintings of the members of Szőnyi's group of followers, the carefully calculated body posture of the figures plays an important role. What we see is the heroic and nevertheless artificial pose of an upper body depicted facing the viewer and the head sharply turning in side-face. This applies to Szőnyi's Self-Portrait of 1921. But because of the low neckline, the strained neck muscles are more emphatic than the face that sinks away slowly in the dark and is painted from an angle that is unusual in self-portraits. The same setting appears in the Pécs artist Jenő Gábor's Self-Portrait painted one year earlier, but this painting tells us more about the real posture of the artist. The observing gaze is concentrating on the reflection in the duplicated mirrors, and the port of the head and the shoulders imply that the artist painted himself in the act of painting. However, while Jenő Gábor's dressed-in-necktie-and-waistcoat self-portrait remains captive of the everyday situation, Szőnyi's ageless, simple and stylised dress and "the gloomy colours of the painfully brown shadow" create a neo-historical atmosphere. The artist's pronounced profile emerges as if in a relief in front of the neutral background illuminated by the slanted beam of the light. The Self-Portrait was displayed in the first major presentation of Szőnyi's works in the Ernst Museum in 1921, and in the next year - first among all his paintings - it was accepted to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts. Szőnyi's early artistic style had a very great influence on his contemporaries and many of the younger painters became his followers. As Jenő Barcsay - talking about this very painting at the Szőnyi-exhibition of 1963 - recalled: "All of us have grown out from this painting. At that time we all wanted to paint like this." There is a photo-portrait of Szőnyi's from this period, the setting and tone of which is in many ways akin to those of the painting and the way his hands are held rhymes with that depicted by Román Petrovics and Jenő Pászk.
The confident, yet reserved posture of Szőnyi's photographic portrait reappears in the first characteristic painting by Vilmos Aba-Novák painted right after the war. The sitter for this picture was again a fellow art student. Tibor Idrányi's dress is more elegant than Szőnyi's; the Lavalliére-tie is a conventional attribute of the painter's cast, while the elegant doublet and the black jacket might refer to the musical interests of the artist, who was actually an excellent violinist as well. From among the pictures painted in 1919 the one entitled His Father's Portrait still bears the marks of the taste of the Art Nouveau, and the turning point is achieved with the Idrányi portrait, which points out the path of development leading to the style of his later paintings. In his earlier paintings the planar, decorative perception of the composition can still be observed. But gradually the simplifying of the forms and the condensing them into a mass of expressive plasticity gain more emphasis. The artists who worked in the same studio at this time often sat for one another and Idrányi - as he recollects - was portrayed by quite a number of them, including Szőnyi and Korb, too. In those miserable days several layers of pictures were painted over one another on the same canvas, and this piece could only be saved from over-painting because Idrányi had offered a blank canvas in exchange for it. Aba-Novák's early monumental pictures were constructed on the basis of a synthesizing form-rendering and sharp light-shadow contrasts.
In 1922 Aba-Novák portrayed again a painter colleague of his, József Hanák who was only 19 at that time and had started his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts one year earlier. Over the period of three years since the Idrányi portrait Aba-Novák's style changed and thanks to the gradually softer handling of light the evocative power of his portraits also increased. Aba-Novák's pictures testify to the influence of the progressive artists who left Hungary in the meantime, i.e. the preceding generation of Hungarian avant-garde. In 1919 young artists moved into the atelier of Róbert Berény, who had emigrated after the fall of the Soviet Republic, and from the autumn of that year Aba-Novák worked here together with Erzsébet Korb and Károly Patkó. Berény, who was seven years older than Aba-Novák, painted the Portrait of Leó Weiner in the year when the Group of Eight had their second exhibition; this portrait of similar concept is more than a decade older than Aba-Novák's painting.
Erzsébet Korb's Sitting Woman appears in a posture resembling that of József Hanák's, with the head tilted, elbows on the armrests of the chair, but while Aba-Novák's sitter of simple dress occupies a rattan chair, the woman figure in costume is sitting enthroned in a chair richly decorated with engravings, and the mysteriously shining landscape background resembles the gentle, haloed slopes of Szőnyi's Double Portrait. The archetypes of Korb's picture can be found in renaissance compositions on the one hand and the monumental female figures of Béla Uitz painted in the 1910s on the other hand, and although these appear within the frame of everyday situations, their figures are saturated with majestic tranquillity. Just like the Alter ego this painting is also more than just a portrait, as the female figure lacking any individual traits with her stylised old-fashioned dress belongs to the symbolic depictions made by Erzsébet Korb. The theme and title of the picture cannot be identified with absolute certainty; it could be the painting entitled Future put on show in the Ernst Museum in 1923. Korb's literature-imitating symbolism is accompanied with a novel painting mode in her early pictures, in which the low-keyed, full local colours enwrap the compact and closed forms.
The other important trend of the early works of the Szőnyi group is the nude depictions. Similarly to the portrait-like or dressed-up half-figures unclothed bodies might also appear in a landscape or an empty studio environment segmented by draperies. In one group of these pictures the nudes with their tectonic construction bear the marks of a type of modelling that was typical in the cubo-expressionism of the 1910s. This type is mainly present in Aba-Novák's art. The sitter for his Female Nude was his life mate and later wife, Katalin Vulkovics (Kató) from the year 1921, and her robust, full figure represented the harmony of monumental forms rather than the conventional concept of ideal female beauty.
In Aba-Novák's other large nude piece the face is again hidden from the viewer's eye, as the poser depicted half-way from the back is turning her head away fully from the viewer. This painting is also dominated by the thick and sharply contoured muscle bundles instead of showing the broad and rounded forms and smooth surfaces so typical in back nudes. The mass of muscles rendered in geometric simplicity and articulated plasticity can be also observed in a dry-point piece of Uitz's, another member of the Youths. The nudes appearing in an interior setting in the works of the Szőnyi group - despite the reduced set of expressive tools - are not without various connotations: the red drapery becomes a drawn-apart curtain, as is commonly used in renaissance compositions, and although the spectacle revealed is not more than a blank, light-coloured surface, the viewer misses the usual landscape background. This historical-imitative trend is even more detectable in the art of other members of the Szőnyi group, as Szőnyi's pictures of similar themes drew from more conventional model pictures in regard to their settings and scenery.
Aba-Novák painted a lot of in-studio nudes around 1921, and he varied the settings as much as possible. Although distantly, but the concept of a human body built up from concise forms is related to the female figures of Nemes Lampérth. A parallel can be drawn between the low-keyed greenish-ochre colours and the impasto brushwork of his broadly smeared paint patches in his standing nude bending against the wall and Nemes Lampérth's Nude Woman of 1916, although in contrast to the latter's suggestive but emotionless form analysis, in Aba-Novák's picture the handling of the light and the posing of the figure permeates the presentation with reserved pathos. And Patkó places the back nude articulated by rich light-shade contrasts in a landscape milieu and relies on a specific action or movement to interpret the figure.
The other group of nudes consists of compositions of many figures. Patkó was the first of the painters working together in Berény's atelier to display a larger collection in the Belvedere in February 1922, half a year after Szőnyi's exhibition in the Ernst Museum in 1921. The exhibition's representative piece and at the same time Patkó's main artwork of his first artistic epoch is the large painting entitled Adam and Eve. Patkó - similarly to the early Szőnyi or Korb pictures - has constructed the painting on the duality of complementary contrasts within the framework of a symmetrical composition: the protesting-rejecting gesture of dark complexioned Adam depicted from the back is in fact a reaction to pale-white Eve's movement of taking and offering the apple. Biblical-mythological references are common in the neoclassic art of the twenties. A picture of Ludomir Slendzinski, a leading artist of the Vilnius school - that was exhibited in Budapest also in 1928 - entitled Daphnis and Chloe and depicting the dichotomised unity of man and woman, could be placed beside Patkó's painting as an Eastern European example. In Patkó's picture the axis of the tree separates the two figures, who in contrast with the idyllic mythology, are in fact the main characters of a drama. In the modern iconography of man's fall the tempting Satan-snake is no longer present, it is only the apple that refers to the biblical story. The shaping of the tree of knowledge resembles the shapes of human bodies, as its roots leaning against the earth and the form of the trunk resembling the V-bend of the knee give rise to anthropomorphic associations. The backgrounds enhance the contrast between the two figures. Sun-lighted white clouds can be seen behind Adam, while the dark-blue-turning sky behind Eve is suggestive of the imminent storm.
The main features of Patkó's early style can be found easily in the nude compositions exhibited in the Belvedere in 1922. Figures modelled as statues play the main part in the paintings of monumental impression, and the marble-smooth polished surfaces of the human bodies refer to not only the patterns of ancient sculpture, but also to the works of the Youths dating a few years back: the shapes of "sliced" bodies built up from rigidly jointed forms display similarities with the bluish nudes of Kmetty rendered in a similar perception. Patkó's compositions are testimony to the influence of renaissance art (e.g. Luca Signorelli), but "the figures and the detail-forms have been broken up according to the recipe of cubism". The cold metallic relief of the background and the tube-like, simplified trees of turquoise shade are also evocative of Kmetty's pictures. This type of 'hard' classicisation was not only common in the Hungarian art of those days, as this style could be traced in the whole of Europe, including the painting of Tamara de Lempicka of Polish origin who nevertheless lived in France, though her art turned into art deco. Returning to Hungary, the early nude compositions of Jenő Gábor - who belonged to the Pécs Artist Circle - can be ranked as belonging to this trend. The mannerist paintings' body-forms shining like armour and the coldly gleaming skin surfaces as well as the figures frozen in a consciously constructed position can be seen in front of a stylised landscape background, just like in Patkó' works. The theme of the scenes cannot always be determined. The richly varied ensemble of male and female figures rarely provide clear clues as to the theme of the opus (e.g. Adam and Eve), and the original title of the works cannot always be reconstructed. Patkó's painting can be identified as the one entitled Spring, which was exhibited in the Belvedere, but the picture label dated 1920 and stuck on the stretcher on the backside of the picture gives only the vague theme designation of 'Kompositio'. The neutral connotation of the depiction allows for the - even subsequent - application of a broad metaphoric title, which was quite common at that age, however another exhibition piece with its choice of a melodramatic theme is connected much more directly to the title (Outcasts).
Korb's nude composition, similarly to Jenő Gábor's picture, depicts a man-woman couple. The standing female figure is lifted out from the otherwise improbably dark, almost black sky background by the fantastic towering cloud formation behind her and the lights radiating from it. The original title of this scene - that has an effect of monumentality, because of the bottom-view - is not known; perhaps it is identical with the painting entitled Study that was displayed in the artist's first major presentation in the Ernst Museum in 1923. It may well be a simple study, but the parallel we can draw is not only between this composition and the works of the Szőnyi Group made around this time, but also between this opus and one of Korb's latent paintings (i.e. the whereabouts of which are unknown), the Wake-up. The man standing on the left in the background is imitating the gesture of the main character with his raised arm - resembling the posture of Michelangelo's Dying Slave or Rodin's Bronze Age - and to the right the symmetrically arranged figures of a woman and man showing their backs to the viewer and bending toward each other make the scene complete.
The main character, the 'accompanying' figures, the hand held above the head and the laid down drapes also appear in the nude scene made in 1919, the earliest of such pictures with a known exact date that takes us back again to Szőnyi's art. The three-figure nude composition was probably displayed together with the Double Portrait in the winter exhibition of the Budapest Art Gallery in 1919-1920. That this work is identical with the one exhibited with the title Composition is supported by the fact that in two documentary photographs of this time - for which Szőnyi improvised an occasional 'exhibition' of his drawings and oil sketches - three preliminary studies of this picture can be seen. This implies the painting's outstanding importance, as we do not know of any other large oil pictures of any similar themes from this year. These sketches give no clues as to their theme, but it is apparent from them that Szőnyi arbitrarily combined the scene from two different parts: a nude woman is lying on some drapery, while two men figures are standing tall in front of the sunk horizon of the landscape background. The posture of the female figure resembles the conventional Venus or Danae compositions, and the still-life part appearing in the left bottom corner of the picture is one that would become a frequently recurring motif in Szőnyi's later pictures.