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BÉLA KÁDÁR (Hungarian, 1877-1955) Troy, 1929 Oil on canvas 38 x 22 inches (96.5 x 55.9 cm) Signed lower right: Kádár Béla Label verso: Oil / Troy / 1929 PROVENANCE: Private collection, California. Béla Kádár is regarded today as one of the most important and influential Hungarian members of the early modernist movement. Born in Budapest into a working-class Jewish family, he lost his father at a young age and was consequently obliged to apprentice himself to an iron-turner after completing only six years of primary school to help the family's financial situation. He eventually began his artistic career by painting murals in Budapest. In the wake of the First World War and its tragic political outcome, the promising process that would have allowed modern art take root in Hungary was interrupted. Though not initially persecuted politically, Kádár, due to his leftist commitments, found himself in a void in Budapest. Like other young artists of his time, he made two pilgrimages to the art centers of Paris and Berlin by 1910 and was eager to expand his professional opportunities internationally. By 1918, he had left his family behind in Hungary to try to make a career in Western Europe. Kádár's first important opportunity came in October 1923 when Herwarth Walden, owner of Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, invited him to stage an exhibition. Walden's importance to the German avant-garde also stemmed from his work as a publisher of a journal, also called Der Sturm, which promoted the works of Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and Oskar Kokoschka. During a group exhibition at Walden's gallery with other artists of Der Sturm, Kádár met Katherine Dreier whose Société Anonyme was instrumental in bringing the work of the European avant-garde to New York. With Dreier's help, two major exhibitions of Kádár's work were planned for the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the second of which Kádár traveled from Europe to attend in 1928. During the course of his years in Berlin, Kádár's earlier expressionist style changed: the emotionally charged and powerfully graphic tone of his work before the 1920s was replaced by a more romantic mood. Elements of folktales and fantasy entered his work, and his subject matter became more narrative. Influenced by the German Expressionist artists, Kádár depicted rustic village scenes, often incorporating dreamlike imagery which has notable affinities with the work of Marc Chagall. Over the years, Kádár experimented with a remarkable number of international trends, including Cubism, Futurism, Neo-Primitivism, and Constructivism. The present work of 1929 is a particularly successful blend of the Cubist vocabulary with quietly evocative dreamlike imagery.