Derkovits, Gyula

Born Apr. 13, 1894, in Szombathely; died June 18, 1934, in Budapest. Hungarian painter and graphic artist; son of a carpenter. Became a member of the Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. During the existence of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 he studied at the Free Art Studio under K. Kernstok.

Derkovits depicted the life and struggle of the Hungarian working class. His works combined merciless truthfulness, laconism and grotesque sharpness of images (which sometimes take on symbolic meaning), dynamic expressiveness of composition, and revelation of the subject on many different levels with qualities of lyricism and restrained harmony in the faded color tones. Examples of his work, which are all in the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, are the series of woodcuts entitled 1514, 1928-29; Terror, tempera, 1930; Three Generations, 1932; The Court Summons, 1930; and Bridge in Winter, tempera, 1933. Derkovits died in abject poverty under the fascist dictatorship.