Portrait of György Bàlint

Portrait of György Bàlint, 1926

Where object was made: Hungary

Material/technique: charcoal; flocked paper

Dimensions:
Object Height/Width (Height x Width): 32.3 x 25.3 cm
Object Height/Width (Height x Width): 12 11/16 x 9 15/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 20 x 16 in

Credit line: Museum purchase

Accession number: 1999.0001

Not on display

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Label texts

Exhibition Label:
"Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts," Mar-2010, Steve Goddard
Miklós Farkasházy started his artistic career in Budapest in early 1910. Initially he worked in an art nouveau style and was drawn to the applied and decorative arts, book illustration, and poster design. In the early 1920s he turned to drawing and engraving. The subject of this
intellectual portrait is György Bàlint (1906-1943), a Marxist journalist and critic, one of the members of the literary left in the Horthy era (1920-1944) in Hungary; he later perished in the Holocaust.

Farkasházy also experimented with various media inventing a new artistic form "fadofits" which he patented in 1935. He coined the term from the abbreviation of his wife's and his own initials ("fa" for Farkasházy, "do" for Gertrud
Maria Donner, Farkasházy's wife, a sculptor) adding a word "fit" at the end which means "done" in Hungarian. "Fadofits" were pictures painted on hard clay tablets with the contours in high relief, thus combining the media of painting and sculpting.