Bernadett Timko

The Artwork of Bernadett Timko

Born in Hungary in 1992, Bernadett Timko is a figurative painter who works primarily in oil paints on linen or wood panel. Using a muted but diverse color palette, she captures a wide range of subjects and moods.

Timko’s initial art training was at the Secondary School of Fine Art in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. She relocated to London to continue her education at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art where she studied figurative painting, printmaking, etching and sculpture. As part of The New School of Art, Timko was a portrait painting tutor in 2023 at the Dairy Studios located within the Old Malling Farm in Lewes, East Sussex.

Bernadett Timko’s work draws some influence from the emotional atmosphere of classical Hungarian paintings. Despite their display of aesthetic harmony, her works occasionally contain undercurrents of rebellion and challenge to traditional conventions. Timko’s figures and objects are prominently presented, often highlighted, against a more artistically textured, somber background. She paints both interiors and portraits. However due to Timko’s fascination with people and the presence they emit, portraiture is her main focus.

Timko regularly exhibits her work at the prestigious Central London art institution, Mall Galleries, her representative in England. Among her many awards are two First Prize Winsor & Newton Young Artist Awards from the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (2015 and 2019); two Phyllis Roberts Awards (2015 and 2018); the 2016 Lynn Painter-Stainers Young Artist Award for her painting “Studio 7”; and the 2017 Prince of Wales Portrait Award from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

Notes: An extensive 2023 studio interview with Bernadett Timko for Britain’s online magazine “Artists & Illustrators” can be found at: https://www.artistsandillustrators.co.uk/featured-artist/in-the-studio-with-bernadett-timko/

Top Insert Image: Dan Higginson, “Bernadett Timko”, Idle Hands Society Interview, May 2022

Bottom Insert Image: Bernadett Timko, “Studio 7”, 2016, Oil on Linen, 152 x 150 cm, Winner of the 2016 Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize

Károly Ferenczy

Paintings by Károly Ferenczy

Born into a Viennese Hungarian-Jewish family in February of 1862, Károly Ferenczy was a teacher and a productive painter. He initially studied law and completed a degree at Vienna’s College of Economy. Encouraged by wife and painter, Olga Fialka, Ferenczy decided to explore painting and traveled to Italy. In 1887, he studied painting in Paris at the Académie Julain and began his painting career in Hungary, where he started painting in a naturalistic style, influenced by French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. .

In 1893, Ferenczy took his family to Munich, where he attended free classes given by the Hungarian painter Simon Hollósy, a leading proponent of Realism and the Naturalist Movement. Hollósy encouraged, among his students, an appreciation for the French painters and their techniques, particularly the practice of open air painting. Returning with his family to Hungary in 1896, Ferencsy joined fellow artists István Réti and János Thorma at Nagybánya, now called Baia Mare, a municipality on the Săsar River.

In 1896, Károly Ferenczy, along with Réti and Thorma, founded a summer retreat for artists at Nagybánya. This eventually developed into an artist colony which attracted many artists from Hungary interested in learning the open-air style taught by Simon Hollósy. Ferenczy has his first exhibition in Budapest in 1903, which began his career as an artist. Three years later, he accepted a teaching position at the Royal Hungarian Drawing School, now known as the Hungarian University of Fine Art. Ferenczy, however, remained strongly associated with the artist colony, where he would return in the summers to teach.

Considered the leader of Hungarian impressionism and post-impressionism, Ferenczy concentrated on mostly studio paintings, which consisted of a traditional array of genres, including nudes, urban scenes of circus performers, and still life paintings. In his later years, his work ranged from portraits to nudes and Biblical scenes. A highly productive artist in both lithography and painting, Károly Ferenczy died in March of 1917.

The Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest holds a collection of fifty-one paintings. The museum held a major retrospective of his work in November of 2011 which included nearly one hundred-fifty paintings, eighty prints and drawings, as well as photographs, letters, and catalogues related to his life and art. His work is held in other regional institutions, including the Frenczy Károly Museum, and in many private collections.

Insert Image: Károly ferenczy, “Self Portrait”, 1893, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 52 cm, Hungarian National Gallery

Erzsébet Korb

Erzsebet Korb, “Alter Ego”, 1920, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 90.5 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1899, as the eldest daughter of Hungarian architect Flóris Korb, Erzsébet Korb was raised in an artistic environment and began painting at an early age. She exhibited three works at the 1916 National Salon in Budapest; these works were heavily influenced by the new classicism. Between 1917 and 1919, Korb studied at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts under painter Oszkár Glatz, who was a member of the Nagybánya art colony which had a rich history of classical compositions of bathers and nudes in the tradition of Cézanne.

Korb was connected through her contacts with the Szőnyi Circle, a group of artists who were developing the new Hungarian post-war classicism. She later shared a studio with Károly Patkó and Vilmos Aba-Novák, both forerunners of the new modern movement. Korb was also influenced by the symbolist painter Aladár Körösfői Kriesch and Gödöllö Art Colony he formed, which linked her classicist style to pre-war symbolism and the secessionist movement. The work she was doing in this period depicted Arcadian scenes with shiny and gloomy lighting, populated by nude mythical figures.

Between 1920 and her death, Erzsébet Korb continued to develop her style, in which she further expanded the nuances between the monumental and partly symbolist imagery of women in idealized nudity. Her works are known for their both melancholy and spiritual atmospheres, and her keen fondness for monumental forms. Korb’s rhythm and a sense for color patterns played a huge role in awakening the often tranquil compositions of neo-classicist paintings back to life.

In 1920, Erzsébet Korb painted her “Alter Ego”, one of her best known oil paintings, which depicts two sides to the personality of the male figure. Her 1921 painting, “Nudes” depicts a male and a female figure; these figures are idealized nudes with bodily features typical of the new classicist style. In Korb’s 1922 “Promised Land”, she added variation and movement to an otherwise tranquil classical composition of nude women. Her 1923 “Revelation” shows androgynous young men acting as saints, with a female figure in awe, bathed in divine light. Korb’s last major work was the 1925 “Danaidae”, a popular mythological subject within the Szőnyi Circle, in which fifty women, after killing their husbands, are condemned to carry water in perforated buckets.

Erzsébet Korb did a study tour of Italy in the spring of 1924; an exhibition of the work opened May in the following year. Shortly after the exhibition, she died of unknown reasons. Korb’s memorial exhibition was held in March of 1927 at the Ernst Museum in Budapest.

Top Insert Image: Erzsébet Korb, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Charcoal on Paper, 36.5 x 30 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Erzsébet Korb, “Saint Sebastian”, 1021, Oil on Canvas, 68.5 x 55 cm, Private Collection

Gyula Tornai

Gyula Tornai, “The Holy Cleansing of the Samurai”, Oil on Canvas, Date Unknown, Private Collection

Gyula Tornai was born in 1861 in a small town in Hungary known as Görgö. He began his artistic career seeking a formal education in the academies in Vienna, Munich and Budapest where he studied under prominent artists such as Hans Makart and Gyula Benczúr.

Tornai’s style was heavily influenced by Makart’s aestheticism and tonality known as Makartstil (“Makart’s style” in German). The vibrantly colored and theatrical, large-scale paintings held a lasting effect on Tornai and are evident in the complex nature of many of his works.

Tornai began his career painting numerous genre scenes, however after his travels to more exotic locales, his choice of subjects changed dramatically. His early visit to Tangier, Morocco, in 1890-91, provided him with new motifs to explore.

In 1900 he exhibited many of the works he completed abroad at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Their immense success provided Tornai with the financial ability to continue his explorations and provoked him to travel for an extended period of time through China, Japan and India. Tornai often designed the frames for his paintings to complement the subject matter.

Thanks to http://monsieurlabette.tumblr.com for the image.

Károly Ferenczy

Paintings by Károly Ferenczy

Top to Bottom Images: “Joseph Being Sold into Slavery”, 1900; “The Return of the Prodigal Son”, 1908; “Orpheus”, 1894

Károly Ferenczy was a Hungarian painter and leading member of the Nagybánya artists’ colony. He was among several artists who went to Munich for study in the late nineteenth century, where he attended free classes by the Hungarian painter, Simon Hollósy. Upon his return to Hungary, Ferenczy helped found the Nagybánya artists colony in 1896, and became one of its major figures. Ferenczy is considered the “father of Hungarian impressionism and post-impressionism” and the “founder of modern Hungarian painting.”