Vajda Lajos Önarckép Kopnyával 1936, Ceruza Kollázs, 12x25.5cm 1936

Vajda Lajos made this pencil collage self-portrait in 1936, and it’s like looking into a mirror darkly. The delicate pencil lines sketch out his face with a kind of haunting precision, all on this gray, moody background. You can almost feel the artist’s hand moving, searching for the right line, the right shadow. But then, there’s this skull and crossbones floating right there in the middle of his forehead—talk about heavy thoughts. I can’t help but wonder what Lajos was going through when he made this. Was he thinking about mortality, about the fragility of life? It’s like he’s peeling back the layers of his own identity, confronting the inevitable. This reminds me of other self-portraits by artists like Beckmann, who also used their own image to explore deeper, existential themes. It makes you realize that art is a conversation, artists echoing each other across time and space.