Zsigmond Béla, Landscape from Constantinople

oil, canvas
40 x 50 cm
signed lower right in brown:  ZSIGMOND
good state of conservation

Béla ZSIGMOND (? - 1945, Oradea)
Artistic education: Private studies in Oradea with master TIBOR Ernö,
Baia Mare artistic colony (1923),
Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1941).
Like his fellow painters from the south of the Carpathians, the Transylvanian painter received the microbe of travels in the interwar period, his peregrinations around the country and abroad becoming over time witnesses of the life of an extremely talented author, but hardly mentioned in the specialized literature.
  Plein-air landscapes from Maramures County are built with touches of vibrant colors, around the central pigment of the Baia Mare Painting Collony, the green of the luxuriant nature, always caressed by the light of a present but gentle sun, or rural landscapes descriptive of the simple life in the ambiance of the Maramurese village, characterize this circumscribed stylistic period the 1920s-1930s.
Later, we find him through the prism of his paintings as a tireless traveler in Italy, Germany, Holland, Turkey, Istanbul (1930), and northern Europe.
The chance of hosting on the shelves of the ART DEPOT a larger number of paintings made in the oriental space, on the occasion of the trip to Istanbul in 1930, brings to the fore the complex profile of the author, in an attempt to balance the historical-architectural documentary value of a rational invoice of the works made here with the stream of feelings, impressions, colors, sensory assaults from all directions, procured by the direct contact with the daily life in the capital of the East.
A painter of Baia Mare Painting Collony descent, Zsigmond always painted attentively to the movements of light. Still, the Constantinopolitan and Italian experience brought him to the pose of a troubadour on canvas of the Sun and its chromatic effects.
The meticulousness of memorizing architectural elements is balanced in these works by the joy of a painting freed from pre-established chromatic conventions by the decisive touch of a warm, direct, spectacular light.