Árpád Szenes was born in Budapest in 1897. Raised in a privileged environment of artists and intellectuals, the young Szenes enjoyed numerous opportunities to familiarise himself with art, its incarnations (music, theatre, sculpture, paintings) and its figures. In his art, he compulsively drew from and took inspiration from these roots. Even when he was drafted into the army as a young adult, he continued to draw alongside his friend Boros-Bierman. Szenes fell ill with tuberculosis and was discharged from service early. From 1918, he was enrolled at Budapest’s Free Academy where he studied under Rippl-Rónai, an artist with numerous prestigious connections in the Paris avant-garde (Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Albert Marquet, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard) and who passed on the breakthroughs of this ground-breaking generation. From 1924 onwards, inspired but unmotivated, Szenes went with the flow of life, travelling through Europe (Berlin, Munich, Florence, Rome and finally Paris) and passively educating himself in the process.
In 1928, in the French capital, he frequented l’Académie de la Grande Chaumière as a free student. There in Paris, Szenes met his future wife Helena Vieira da Silva, with whom he went on to form one of the most famous artistic duos of modern art, and they got married two years later. They first lived at ‘la Villa des Camélias’ with Jules Pascin, Edgard Varèse and Kokoschka as their neighbours. In 1931, they moved to ‘Atelier 17’ and befriended the surrealist painters Juan Miro and Max Ernst. Szenes mostly imitated the style of the modern masters in various workshops throughout these periods.
In 1939, the couple moved to Lisbon. In the Portuguese capital in 1940, Szenes exhibited his original works for the first time. As they did in Paris, the couple surrounded themselves with local intellectuals in order to cultivate their own work — a habit they would re-establish in Brazil when they moved there later in the 1940s. By 1944, their initial studio had attracted over 200 students, forcing them to open a second location in Rio. Exhibitions in North and Latin America punctuated the rest of the decade (Rio de Janeiro Fine Arts Museum, the MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cincinnati Art Museum). Following this successful transatlantic escapade, the couple returned to Paris in 1947.
This return marked a formal transition, namely with the creation of the Banquet series. From 1949 onwards, these works were exhibited across Europe and beyond, being shown at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris, the Musée cantonal de Lausanne and the Kunsthaus in Zurich, in Milan and Copenhagen, and at the Sao Polo Biennale and the Guggenheim in New York.
A subsequent trip through Portugal and Spain in 1958 inspired the development of landscape motifs and the use of earthy or maritime colour, and — starting in 1960 — the stratified evolution of what is termed ‘the vertical expansion of the horizon’. With this shift came the adoption of larger scales and formats. In 1972, a comprehensive retrospective of Szenes’ work was exhibited in France’s national museums.
Szenes passed away in 1985. A foundation bringing together a portion of his works was set up in his honour in Lisbon.
