The role-playing portraits might grow into multi-figure compositions or hidden portraits may appear in costumed scenes. Gyula Derkovits got the theme of his Last Supper from the Bible, and placed the human figures, forced into rectangular forms, in front of an arcaded landscape rendered in expressionist style. The early Derkovits artworks bear the footprints of the cubo-expressionism of the 1910s, while the use of bluish-reddish colours and the cubistic form creation show the influence of Kmetty's art. Kmetty's rigorously symmetrical picture entitled Sermon on the Mount depicts a biblical story as well. Ernő Kállai comments on their dual inspirations with criticism: "Kmetty composes assumptions and sermons on the mount in the renaissance spirit. And how successfully, well, that is another question. Unfortunately, the outwardly renaissance framework of Cézanne's tectonics is all too obvious in Derkovits' reproduction of the Last Supper, too." The artist's wife wrote on the way the painting was created: "he has been preoccupied with the theme of the supper, because it arouses family memories in him. He and his brothers would sit around the table at summer evenings in the old days, and had had big and fruitful debates at dinner." At the peak of the pyramidal composition - imitating the common gestures in the portraits of Szőnyi's group - Derkovits himself is standing high up, with his head tilted and his hands over his chest. Next to the figure of the painter himself, set at the head of the table as Christ, are four sitting figures in modern clothes. Their pronounced facial features carry the traits of Derkovits himself, and thus "in his recollection of his brothers, he in fact multiplies himself".
Pécs Artist Circle member Henrik Stefán's painting titled The Samaritan also draws its theme from the Bible. This New Testament parable inspired a number of other contemporary artists: from among the neo-classicist youths who had visited Nagybánya, Dávid Jándi and Vince Korda also worked out their own adaptations of the story, and we know of pictures carrying this same theme from Ernő Jeges who had worked in the Bicske colony of artists and from one of the most outstanding representatives of Croatian neo-classicism, Sava Sumanovic, too.
Another, much more common type of depicting a nude body falling on the ground draws its inspiration from the Passion of Christ. Depictions of the episodes of taking Christ's body off the cross, the Pieta, or the mourning scenes, as known from traditional Christian iconography, became widespread from the 1910s: the holding up of suffering, lifeless bodies and mourning over the dead gained political connotations at the time of World War I. The most widely know piece of the works of the Youths is Uitz's powerful dramatic dry-point. And Péter Dobrovics's Lamentation of Christ, a reproduction of which appeared on the title page of the art magazine 'A Tett' (The Action) proved to be so provocative that it led to the confiscation of the particular issue on the grounds of blasphemy. Many of Dobrovics's students at Pécs used similar themes as their source of inspiration. In addition to Stefán's The Samaritan Farkas Molnár's - who had painted Saint Sebastian - symbolic-allegorical Lamentation goes beyond the specific biblical story, and his bluish-reddish colour scheme and cubistic figures are akin to the style of Kmetty's and Derkovits' pictures. Among his characters, the kerchief-wearing old woman and the young woman could still fit among the conventional iconographic framework, but the athletic-bodied, smooth-faced young man's figure depicted as if growing out from the dead man's loins and the bay and the sailing boat in the background carry a message that is hard to decode. From among the members of the Szőnyi group, Erzsébet Korb made her own interpretation of the A Pietà theme in two oil pictures.
Apart from biblical framework themes the ancient Greco-Roman mythology is the most common source of inspiration for the many-character compositions. Szőnyi's setting, in which his figures are depicted slightly from bottom view in front of a sunk horizon follows the pattern of his nude drawing made in Nagybánya three years earlier. Here again, the background is not an idealised nowhere-land, but a specific landscape; the row of cellars dug into the hillside and the village in the distance are suggestive of Budakalász, where Szőnyi had painted in the early twenties. The painting entitled The Three Graces was a main item at the exhibition in the Enrst Museum in 1921. According to critics of the time, "with its colours melting in a golden shade, it almost looks like the achievement of accomplished manhood". One can find similar scenes not only in Renaissance and Baroque art, but also in the pictorial art of the 19th century, and writing about the nude compositions of the 1910s and 20s art historians regularly referred to the modern painters marking the major milestones leading up to their contemporary epoch. Fritz Burger in his book titled Cézanne und Hodler discussed not only the two masters referred to in the title, but also - right after discussing Szőnyi's example, Rembrandt - the art of Hans von Marées whose influence cannot be neglected when talking about the painting art of Szőnyi and his followers. "There was another artist who - as Szőnyi admitted - had a strong influence on him. He was Hans von Marées..., Szőnyi inherited from him the romantic pathos engrafted in the Greek-classical posture of the figures...", Iván Fenyo wrote in the first monograph ever written on the artist. The main precedent characters of Ernő Kállai's article on Ödön Márffy written in 1924 are also Cézanne, Hans von Marées and "the other late, literally late-arriving master of classical composition: Hodler". Hans von Marées impressed the young artists of the Szőnyi group with the brownish nudes of his gloomy-toned Golden Age pictures, while Hodler impressed them primarily with his rhythmically agitated figures depicted in compositions of symbolic force. In Hungary the group of Eight's art can be linked to this Arcadia school, however the nostalgic past-searching attitude is replaced by an utopian optimism looking ahead into the future in their pictures: "It is as if the plastic form and the re-birth of the composition meant an ethical re-birth." This joyful world and the visions of carefree vegetative existence appear in Béla Uitz's drawings of monumental atmosphere as well as in Derkovits's pastoral idylls (Shepherd Boy, 1922) and in his musical-harvesting group compositions that line up various generations of man (Concert, 1921; Under the Big Tree, 1922) made in the early twenties.
But in the art of the Szőnyi group much greater emphasis is placed on tragic mythologies than those with a neutral or joyful atmosphere. In these works the human bodies, predominantly female nudes, became the site of formal or compositional experiments. The almost monochrome compositions emphasising the plastic mass of the bodies were in fact synthesises of the artistic experiments of the preceding few years. Károly Patkó's painting titled Niobe fits in well with the series of representative, summarising artworks, such as István Szőnyi's The Danaides and Vilmos Aba-Novák's Bathing Women. According to Greek mythology, the bragging of Niobe, the queen of Thebes with her seven sons and seven daughters provoked the anger of the gods. The children of the indignant goddess Latona, Apollo and Artemis therefore arrowed down Niobe's children and Niobe turned into a stone in her great grief. Patkó places the figures finely modelled by light-shadow effects in a stage-like foreground, in front of a radiating background, as if on a pedestal, freezing them in different postures. The plastic, rounded forms reflect the powerful inspiration of Hellenistic sculpture - the works of which the artist might have seen during his trip to Italy - in addition to the influence of the renaissance masters. This sculpture-like perception is reinforced by the reserved colouring that is based primarily on cooler blues, enlivened in some places by the shades of mauve and pinkish. As Károly Lyka observed writing about the Aba-Novák and Patkó works exhibited in the Ernst Museum: "however the human figures of these two painters are sometimes bronze bodies that imply the materiality of the precious and hard metal rather than the blooming of the epidermis".
The main piece in Szőnyi's second collective exhibition of 1924 and the synthesis of his first artistic epoch was The Danaides. The graphic and oil sketches made in preparation for this monumental picture take us through the process of developing and perfecting the composition. This picture would not convey the sombre mood so characteristic of Erzsébet Korb's work of similar theme, and it is as if the lively, energetic nudes were not the characters of this fatal mythological story, despite the title of the picture. The group of women who had murdered their husbands and consequently doomed to eternal punishment - i.e. the gathering of water all in vain - looks rather as the entity of nude studies conducted in the seclusion of the studio placed one beside the other. The figures rendered in slightly stout and square-built proportions appear also in the works of the young sculptors, such as the early statuettes of Pál Pátzay (Woman With a Jar, 1919). Pátzay returns once again to the motif of the water-carrying nude woman, and his statue reminiscent of the main character of The Danaides was made at the time when he and Szőnyi worked in the same atelier. In The Danaides, the picture that radiates timelessness, the composition is still centred around the variegated postures and harmonic grouping of warm-brown bodies, as Iván Fenyo observed in his monograph on the early Szőnyi pictures: "It is a classical composition, because the setting of the problem comprises the engineering of the picture-stage and the rhythmic assonance of the figure's gestures, in other words fundamentally the usual compositional elements of the renaissance." But Szőnyi is no longer able to fully achieve a synthesis of the different components in this summarising artwork. Although in his criticism of the exhibition Károly Lyka gives an objective appreciation of the figures arranged "in an almost architectonic balance", he also concludes that the scene is ultimately the town of "Zebegény dressed up as a tropical paradise". Ernő Kállai is much more merciless in his criticism one year later: "Our neo-romantic expressive naturalists tend to mount this local atmosphere as a scenery for the conceited episodes of Greek mythology, the Bible and Christ's passion. Or they »are satisfied« with the representative and spectacular depiction of the man and the nature." In his opinion "Szőnyi's and his followers' compositions evoking the renaissance" were already outdated, as already more modern neo-classicist tendencies could be observed in their place in the Hungarian art, and it is obvious that the "vehement gesticulation, the robust nude shows and the mournfully rejoicing 'clair-obscur' feelings" have become anachronistic.
Erzsébet Korb's monumental nude compositions imbued with spiritual light form a separate group within the artworks of the Szőnyi Group. "She coloured the skin surface of her nudes depicted with classical clarity of form the same way as seen in the works of István Szőnyi and his followers", but while in Szőnyi's, Aba-Novák's and Patkó's pictures the biblical, mythological or even neutral themes served primarily as the external framework for nude representations, Korb strived earnestly to represent symbolic notions in her paintings. In most cases the artworks do not follow conventional iconographical examples, as the bathing, titivating or the (in the interior) dressing and undressing everyday nude figures are completely missing from her repertoire. Writing about Korb's exhibition in 1923, Iván Hevesy stressed the "classicism of the composition", and at the same time drew attention to the expression of "a new perception of the world", "this is how her pictorial art arrives at symbolism that does not tolerate the creation of mere allegories..." In her picture entitled Worship the "huge female figure composed into a triangular formation calls to mind the Wake-up"; she is waiting with her eyes closed and although her face is not very much individualised, her idealised features show some similarities with Korb's self-portrait made around the same time: the high forehead, the straight nose and the hair-do look familiar from a photo of the artist - even if the poser was someone else - are suggestive of a hidden self-portrait.
A contrasted male-female pair often appears in the pictures of the Szőnyi group (e.g. Patkó: Adam and Eve), and similar scenes can be observed in the works of Erzsébet Korb, too. In her picture entitled A May the self-revealing pose of a man counterpoints the closed-up posture of the nude girl reminiscent of the kneeling female figures of the Devotion. The closely intertwined hands and the tree-branch bending into the centre of the picture, which the man's hand is holding onto - despite the reserved characterisation of the figures - carry hardly concealed sexual allusions. The drapery-like undulating landscape background of May reappears in the picture entitled Danae representing the story of miraculous godly nuptials, and here a bare tree frames the nude figure of closed eyes from the two edges with its gnarled branches looming against the sky.
Light plays a special role in the paintings of the Szőnyi group members, particularly Erzsébet Korb's works. The light cult and light symbolism of the age can also be detected in another form of art, literature: "the lust that I call light" - wrote the Hungarian poet, Lorinc Szabó in his poem Light that appeared in his volume titled Light, Light, Light published in 1925. Light was the metaphor of a transcendent or sometimes a really mundane desire that nevertheless was transfigured into something immaterial that reappeared again and again in Korb's painting art. Her Danae is not the Princess of Argos passively revealing herself before the rain of gold or raving in oblivious ecstasy, instead she is rather awaiting the pouring down of the enlightening, fructifying heavenly light.
The man and woman relationship ridden with ambivalent emotions and tensions serves as the foundation for the picture entitled Revelation, the iconographic preliminaries of which can be found in one type of representation of Christ lying dead on the cross. (There is a known example for a version of the crucifixion that is treated with spiritual light, but is more expressive and goes back to Grünewald, and it can be found in Polish neo-classicist painting. In the picture of Antoni Michalak, who belonged to the Fraternity of Saint Luke, again a woman prostrates before a man whose hands are opened wide apart.) In Korb's picture we can witness a profane stigmatisation: here the kneeling woman bows deep in veneration of the angel-like apparition, from whose palms - hand wounds? - light beams are radiating. The situation is plainer in the drawing sketch made in preparation for the painting: the light beam falling on the woman here does not cover the genitals of the man and the wings stylised into flying up drapes here dominate the composition as a heavy patch, and on the left a defoliated tree looms against the sky as if complementing or reinforcing the arch of the two figures' posture. In this picture again a woman and a man are standing facing each other. The representation of the two figures reflects the conventional stereotypes of the depiction of figures of different sexes: in front of the heightening and symmetric body of the man viewed from the front a woman is crouching in prostration, depicted halfway from the back. The dominance of the male is indicated by volume-increasing poses familiar from ethology, such as the arms spread out wide, while the bodily dimensions of the woman are to be diminished, she puts her arms tightly to her side in a gesture of resignation and she turns her head or look away. At the same time beside the contrasting of male and female figures an opposite trend can also be observed in Korb's pictures: the softening or even the 'similarisation' of sex attributes. Korb's woman figures are fundamentally different from the stout and often bosomy posers depicted by the man-painters of the Szőnyi group: her female nudes of boyishly narrow waist and square shoulders have short-trimmed hair and represent the modern female ideal of modern times. The men - the characters of the May or the Revelation - on the other hand are not much different from their woman counterparts, their softly formed bodies are framed by gently arched rounded outlines, and the same androgenous features can be detected in the dual male figures of the Alter Ego, too.
Erzsébet Korb painted her last great opus, The Danaides at the end of her journey to Italy. In her charcoal pieces the influence of the Italian renaissance masters, primarily Michelangelo became more pronounced. It is as if her woman figures dressed up from top to toe were the elder sisters of the nudes appearing in one of her early pictures titled The Promised Land: however, these figures of low-hanging heads and closed eyes are no longer the embodiments of hopeful expectations; instead, they are women who submitted finally to their tragic fates. While the heritage of cubo-expressionism is apparent in the dynamic grouping of simplified forms in the sketches made for In the Promised Land, a spiritual light pouring down from above - characteristic of later Korb paintings - is gleaming over the final oil version. Although the arrangement and postures of the girls of modern hair-do are still filled with classicist reminiscences, their passive body postures and bowed heads are counterbalanced by only two arms arching upwards in the central axis of the picture. But The Danaides moved away not only from her own early works, but also from the perception of Szőnyi's compositions of the same theme. In Korb's painting the colours have become cold and fallow, the joyfully slanting hillsides have frozen into rigid rocks, and the sunshine is no longer the purifying flow of the long-awaited sanctifying and saving grace, but instead it symbolises irrevocable punishment that nails one upon the ground. „These inconsolable maids of mythology are depicted here as the symbols of life's tragedy, their meaning growing far beyond the boundaries of the ancient tale."
As her contemporaries put it, Korb's nude scenes are "imbued with Hodler reminiscences", and the costumed figures of The Danaides recall in the viewer Hodler's Eurhythmie, still they point to other directions as well in her composition of decorative arrangement and symbolic title given to the picture. The body language of the figures in Korb's pictures is not so much following the conventional 'pathos formulas' of ancient art, as the settings that often seem artificial are familiar from the eurhythmics that developed and was so popular in that age. In this period both fine arts and eurhythmics became an important battle ground for women's emancipationist efforts, as the new female roles, the artistic creativeness and the promised liberation of the body attracted more and more women to these areas. This parallelism is more emphatic in the personal fate of Erzsébet Korb, as in her family she was the painter, while her younger sister, Flóra was the dancer. Iván Hevesy, the critic praising the artist's exhibition in the Ersnt Museum in 1923 was a close friend of the eurhythmist Alice Madzsar, and had participated in the setting up of the Movement and Culture Society, an umbrella organisation for various schools. The eurhythmic schools often performed symbolic-allegoric themes inspired by biblical and mythological stories. In Valéria Dienes' orchestic school Babits' poem, The Danaides was dance-performed in 1917, and from the mid-twenties religious mystery-plays and chorus dramas were performed (Awaiting Dawn, 1925; The Beatitudes, 1926). The striving for expressing emotions was an important element in these eurhythmic works. The dance - to quote Olga Szentpál and Máriusz Rabinovszky - "comes forth from the depth of the soul and lends embodiment to condensed spiritual happenings". The characters in Erzsébet Korb's paintings - as referred to by the titles of the works - represent not only symbolic contents, but also this philosophising perception, and her pictures are examples for "pantomimic speech".
It is much more difficult to find the key to Korb's symbolism compared to the works of the other neo-classicist painters. As for the way the Revelation was born, Genthon only mentioned that "an anguished childhood vision takes form in it". We know little about the painter's life and personality, but as her contemporaries characterised her, "Böske (a nickname for Erzsébet, like Liz in English) Korb was a bewitching blonde demon and a very talented artist"... "who with her masculine behaviour fascinated and gathered around her the young artist students of Epreskert". We know from the recollections of family members that her husband, János Tímár left her to marry her younger sister, Flóra. This personal disappointment coupled with the artists self-willed behaviour, that was regarded probably as unusual by her man colleagues, could offer some explanation for the ambivalent nature of Korb's pictures: "This is what Erzsébet Korb was like in life: she was full of fresh zest for life on the outside, and pure, silent sorrow inside... some unspeakable Weltschmerz must have lain hidden in the depths of her soul." But all this is just imagination, because it is not clear how much of the few recollections about this woman artist who died at a young age is a true reflection of reality, and how much is just part of the myth that was created around her later. The cause of her early death is not known, but her alleged addiction to morphine could have played a part in it, just as it could have influenced her art, the way that she "depicted her artistic dreams in visions of ceremonious rhythm" Perhaps this is what Imre Nagy referred to when he said: "all in all it was her slovenly, lecherous life that ruined her, causing her death".