A typical classification and ranking of artistic genres can be observed in the art of the Szőnyi group. Beside the individual human figures - portraits or nudes - landscapes also play an important role. Due to his education at Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania) and his close ties to the traditions of that school Szőnyi is certainly the prominent landscape painter of all of the group members. His pictures display a great variety of styles, they reflect the influence of the sketchy-dynamic landscape drawings of the Youths in respect of their animation and expressiveness. The oil painting titled Hillside in Nagybánya was made in 1917, the same year as the Double Portrait, but it is the manifestation of a completely different perception. With the dissonant contrast of the yellow-greens of trees coming down in torrents on the hillside and the cold blue colours of the sky, the painting is no longer heir to the Nagybánya 'plein air' art, instead there is an effort to rewrite in geometric simplicity the organic forms of nature. An India ink drawing similar to this hectic, asymmetric landscape is known from 1916 when Uitz stayed in Kecskemét, and that composition laden with suppressed tension is only one year earlier than Szőnyi's.
While Szőnyi searched for further motifs for his landscapes in Nagybánya that time around Budapest, and Aba-Novák did the same in Bodajk and Tarján, the members of the Pécs Artist Circle found their themes in their town and its surroundings. Three of them toured Italy in 1921, and made some oil pictures in addition to several drawings. These townscapes and landscapes of unusual perspectives show a distinct mark of cubism, particularly the drawings published by Farkas Molnár and Henrik Stefán as students of the Bauhaus of Weimar in a lithographic folder in 1922. Shell-like natural forms appear in Hugó Johan's painting entitled Sicily and the same tectonic perception can be observed in Jenő Gábor's drawings depicting the Mecsek mountains, which in turn are related to the lapidary forms of Aba-Novák's Landscape depicting the Calvary hill at Bodajk.
The Venus and Danae depictions of classic painters served as examples to follow for the members of the group of Eight and the Youths - particularly Péter Dobrovics (Petar Dobrovic) - who were attracted to mannerist art. Károly Patkó's nude composition from 1921 is probably a smaller sized variation of the nude piece that was pointed out by István Hevesy in connection with the exhibition in the Belvedere in 1922, saying that it was „in its entire composition an intentional variation of the lying position and situation that had been painted by so many since Titian's Venus of Urbino. The arrangement of the drapery behind the woman and the woman herself are rendered in the classic renaissance style, while the landscape of the background, the blanket at the bottom of the picture and the fruits placed on it reflect the post-Cézanne postimpressionist style."
The contemporary critics also noted this duality in the works of the neoclassic generation of painters, i.e. the heritage of the avant-garde of the 1910s beside the imitation of the old masters, which is manifest particularly in the early paintings and drawings of Károly Patkó and Vilmos Aba-Novák. Aba-Novák's Nudes in a Landscape was made as an early synthesis of his analysing, form-and structure-exploring nude studies. This is a quasi-monochrome composition type, of which richer charcoal and etched sketches with more side-figures are known.
In respect of style and themes the works of Jenő Gábor, from among all the members of the Pécs Artist Circle, made around 1919-1923, can be ranked among the neoclassic works of the twenties. This is evident from his nude composition entitled Orpheus that fits in well with the works of the Szőnyi group with its monochrome, bluish colouring and plastically depicted, sculpturally perceived figures. This picture had been included in the collection of the Hungarian National Gallery as one painted by Vilmos Aba-Novák, but the identity of the painter remained controversial, as it was not possible to fit it among the few remaining early paintings without any doubts. For this reason parallel works were sought among the artworks of the Pécs group and János Kmetty's pictures, but without success. It was really by accident that a small-sized tint-sketch of the painting, signed by Jenő Gábor appeared in the commemorative exhibition of the works of Jenő Gábor held in the Ráday Gallery in 1999, and this made it possible for us to identify the real painter. The closest parallels of the central construction and monumental-like composition of the Orpheus are nude and music concert scenes depicted by the artists that had been made primarily in graphic versions (tint-drawings and lithographs).
The multi-character figural compositions are often expanded into powerful symbolic scenes. Aba-Novák had earlier made several versions of the motif of the group of three figures that appears on the right hand side of the etching of 1922 entitled Golgotha. Aba-Novák was probably influenced by a reproduction of Ferdinand Hodler's painting entitled Eurhythmie - as found in the illustrated volume of Fritz Burger titled Cézanne und Hodler first published in 1917 - to paint the Eremites, and the same way the archetype of the wood-cutter appearing in the Proletarians can be found in that same volume. In addition to the similar ring of the titles, the rhyming compositions of the two paintings also seem to confirm this: Hodler's picture of "pleasing rhythm" depicts male figures dressed in richly pleated robes in varied postures.
Many-figured compositions placed in biblical-mythological framework themes are often seen in Aba-Novák's early graphic works. The artist executed in oil versions some of the animated crowd scenes, too, but only a few larger completed paintings are known to us apart from these variations. The most significant opus is the altered, extended version of the tint-drawing entitled Carrying the Cross, known as the Golgotha. Aba-Novák widened the scene of originally narrowed view-cut, and on the right hand side of the picture a crowd of people congested into a homogeneous mass is heaving up and down, and in front of he background - i.e. the Calvary motif recurring regularly in later artworks - a figure dressed in white robe and raising his hand toward heaven is standing high in the centre of the picture. As a self-educated painter, Aba-Novák strived mainly to transplant the matured results of his graphic attempts into his oil paintings, but while he was able to create a balance between the values of the drawing and the large, consistent surfaces, the lines and the crowds in his portraits and nude couples, the transposition of the many-character compositions into oil paintings was never completely successful. The vibrating transparency of the tint-drawings is lost in the oil picture, while the human bodies drawn in sharp contours are congested into an undistinguishable mass. Animation and dynamism are lost as the line-drawing is replaced by compact forms, and the reddish-brown colour scheme only stresses further the lifelessness of the composition. The sketchy, schematic rendering and theatrical setting is akin to Kmetty's pictures of biblical themes. In one version of the Sermon on the Mount - just like in Jenő Gábor's Orpheus - the central figure of the composition is one that raises his hands towards the sky.
The most rarely occurring artistic genre of the Szőnyi group is still-life, the very form that played a major role in the art of the previous generation, i.e. the group of Eight and the Youths. Berény and Czigány, or Perlrott-Csaba and Nemes Lampérth - following the example of Cézanne - probed the rules of spatial and formal relations in their still-lifes, but a certain attraction to previous ages can also be detected from time to time in their art. Kállai's comments on Berény's succinct still-lifes that lit up from the dark, amply describe Patkó's pictures made a decade later: "The unbroken plasticity concentrated in a dominant mass in this still-life is a renaissance heritage." The colour scheme of Still-life with a Jar, a painting put on show in the Belvedere, is dominated by the deep-burning blues of the Patkó-pictures, and the tiny red patches of paprika ring out from this. The heavily rendered objects are sliced up by strong spotlights and rim lights - just like in the nude compositions - and the soft folds of the non-functional hangings inserted in the composition are in contrast with the gleaming surfaces, particularly the smooth, round form of the bulging pot, resting on the table. One of Lajos Fonó's painting of 1923 belongs to the few still-lifes. Fonó, as Aba-Novák's friend and later his business partner in his paint factory imitated or copied mainly the compositions of the members of the Szőnyi Group, but he was able to break free from the direct influence of his examples in some of his paintings.
While Lajos Fonó worked under Aba-Novák's and Patkó's influence, Jenő Gábor developed his art in parallel with them, and he painted his still-life in a similar style with Patkó's and in the same year with his artistic product. Gábor's painting resembled the paintings of the German Neue Sachlichkeit, for instance Alexander Kanoldt's cool and hard-surfaced cactus still-lifes.
Not only the flowers, but also the fruits have disappeared from Aba-Novák's still-life, that can be viewed rather as a narrowed-down interior extract, as if the banal situation were a cut-out detail of all the necessary attributes of a larger figural composition. But contrary to the cataloguing-detailing impassibility of the Neue Sachlichkeit, here we see the transfiguring of the groups of everyday objects, just like in the works of other - foreign - artists, such as Giorgio Morandi, a member of the Valori Plastici movement, or the members of the Polish Formists, for instance Jacek Mierzejewski.