Vilmos Aba-Novák

Vilmos Aba-Novák built figures out of blocks. Peasants at markets, circus performers, riders, all constructed with heavy simplified volumes and strong outlines that owe something to Italian fresco and something to the modernist air of the 1920s and 30s.

He studied in Budapest, then spent formative time in Italy, and the monumental public commissions that followed, church decorations and murals, made him one of interwar Hungary’s most visible artists. That visibility became complicated: several major works served the Horthy regime’s nationalist programme, and some were later destroyed or hidden.

The smaller paintings and prints are where the energy is. Crowded fairground scenes, dense with movement, painted in hot reds and ochres. He died in 1941, in his forties.