Curved Street at Szentendre 1940

Kmetty János made this painting of a street in Szentendre, Hungary, with oil on canvas, and it feels like a fleeting impression. Check out those strokes of pink, yellow, and blue – they seem to dance across the canvas. I can almost feel János standing there, squinting in the sunlight, trying to capture the way the light bounces off those buildings. The paint is applied with quick, decisive strokes; you can see where the brush hit the surface and then lifted away again. It’s like he’s chasing after a feeling, not just rendering a scene. I bet he was thinking about Cézanne, or maybe some of the other post-impressionists who were trying to get at something deeper than just surface appearances. Think about the woman walking along the street – she’s almost like an afterthought, but she adds a sense of scale and humanity to the scene. It's this type of gesture, not just trying to copy what is in front of you, but communicating something about how the light is shifting, how the colours interact, or what it feels like to be there. That’s what makes painting so exciting, isn’t it?