Czóbel Béla 1903 Festőművész Portré 1903

This is Bela Czobel’s self-portrait, probably from 1903, when he was just 20, and you can tell there is a certain urgency to it. I can feel the artist smearing the paint—dragging the pigment across the canvas, building a thick crust of colour. It’s a very physical process, painting, a real back and forth between what you intend and what the paint actually does. You can almost feel what it must have been like to stand in front of that canvas, brush in hand, wrestling with the representation of the self. He's working in this post-impressionistic way with a restricted palette of greens, browns, and reds, but then there are these tiny daubs of contrasting colours, like the blues in the eyes, that seem to vibrate. The hand at the bottom is particularly interesting. It is like he signed the painting with it – a literal, and kind of confrontational, sign of his presence. You just know he was looking at Van Gogh, at the way he built up paint. Painters are always talking to each other, across time, borrowing ideas and techniques, pushing each other to see things in new ways. This painting is a powerful statement about the ongoing potential of painting to explore what it means to be alive, to be present in the world.