NAGY BALOGH, János

Nagy Balogh managed to appraise at the beginning of his career where he could best rival with painters who had an academic education. This is why he began to survey the surroundings of his well-known home and to study fundamental esthetic issues arising from the world of simple interiors. His early interiors of rooms and kitchens were characterized by indiscriminate selection. He is trying to reproduce his poorly studio in a “narrative style”. These pictures are characterized by carefully selected light effects, by colours embedded in brown, which reflect the influence of Munich and a respect of Munk�csy. Interiors with a spontaneous portrayal were substituted by more mature compositions of the early 1910s. Elements of “Atelier” are those of a stylized architecture. Colours of the picture are not far from those of plein air yet but definite contours and careful statics of objects reflect composition in C�zanne’s style. Objects are no longer eventual, but peculiar, short-spoken and symbolic.

Nagy Balogh was aquainted with the works of Millet. This is proven by the fact the in his bequest several reproduction of Millet’s painting was found. This painting - and some other, too - shows the influence of Millet on the art of Nagy Balogh.

The picture, a small one with a figure, is the most significant composition in Nagy Balogh’s series of 40 pictures on navvies. He does not want to depict a single scene but he concludes the general from a sight he often saw. The figure of a worker standing in front of the low horizon is bursting the picture, he becomes timeless and akin to figures in Egyptian frescoes thousands of years before. The painter is trying to arrest the figure in a characteristc and dynamic movement and to make his solid statics a part of an architectural structure. Nagy Balogh cannot have known much of C�zanne’s art or the cubists’ or the Eights’ principles of composition; his figure, controlled and closed, the arrow and the simplified geometrical mass of the earth indicate constructivism. The logical, clear composition dominates a subdued world of colours. The ochre and green of the light blue and the gently sloping landscape, which is hardly disturbed by the glazed browns and blue of shadows, the yellowish jacket of the figure fitting into these surroundings, orangish-pinkish trousers and gentle reflexes are suggestive of a real artistic sensitivity. Reflexes of light, the clothes and the barrow make the atmosphere of the picture peculiar. In this poetic realism, Nagy Balogh’s “Navvy” is elevated to the symbol of a man who works in nature and who overcomes it; this symbol culminates in Derkovits’ lyric portrayal of workers.

Nagy Balogh painted his self-portraits as sketches at the beginning of his career. Later, his best pictures came from among them. Pictorial qualities dominated them more and more, e.g. changes of shadow and light, emhasis of transitions between flat and uneven and the ambition to arrest the most characteristic elements of his own face with the simplest tools. The resulting pictures are varied just like the range of psychic states. They are all characteristic examples of self-study and intospection because periods of despair and stagnation during his career and successes at the peak of his career are reflected in the picture.

Self-confidence as a result of his results and tranquility characterize his later “Self-Portrait” considered by art experts particularly as “Dutch”. Nagy Balogh’s self-portraits generally show Rembrandt’s influence, whereas portraits painted around 1912 are close to Frans Hals’ pictures. Lajos N�meth mentions in his monograph on Nagy Balogh that the painter must have seen Hals’ “Portrait of the Painter Jan Asselyn” in the Museum of Fine Art. The structure of the face, the moustache, the brilliant brushwork and the way he treated whites suggest Hals’ influence, the portrait is still a typical picture of Nagy Balogh’. The characteristic face almost like a square and the hat projecting a shadow on the forehead, few colours, e.g. yellows, whites and greys glazed on the dark background and producing greenish reflexes - these are all very typical of Nagy Balogh. Mil�n F�st, a Hungarian poet, wrote the following about his late picture: “It was a portrait in light colours, painted with wide brushstrokes. It was the deep restfulness of the composition which fascinated me at first. A portrait like that could only be painted by a person who had gone through the sufferings of struggles and hesitations, who had reconciled with himself and the world, whose fire was steady: it does not cease burning and it has no emotions … The person who painted it, managed to concentrate his powers, and all skills reached a maximum whenever he took the brush into his hand.”

J�nos Nagy Balogh’s motivation was to understand and show the creative power of art through everyday objects and the rituals of manual labour. As he could not afford to participate in lengthy artistic training, he had to recourse to constant analytic observation and interpretative representation to help him achieve increasingly mature artistic expression. In creating his own style he took some guidance from compositions by the Dutch masters and Millet.

In Nagy Balogh’s art, the cycle of self-portraits is supplemented by a cycle representing his mother. There are several examples of this subject in Hungarian painting, however, a cycle of these painting is unique. The mother, a laundress, was the helper of the art of his son, as well as his best modell.

J�nos Nagy Balogh seldom drifted away from the world of enclosed spaces and when he did, it was never far from his home. In his representations of the labourers working on nearby streets he studied the movements of human beings engaged in physical work. The monumental figures of his peasant women working in the fields, a theme inspired by Millet, are silhouetted against a horizon in which the blue sky and the haystack-spotted green field meet. In the strong sunlight the lit and shaded parts sharply separate, the clumsy figures, represented by powerful spots of paint picture the solemn struggle of agricultural workers.