Boy Holding a Ball

Béla Czóbel was a Budapest-born painter who profoundly influenced the development of modern art in Hungary. Czóbel began studying painting in a Romanian artists’ colony, continuing his training in Munich and then in Paris. The Fauvist paintings of the Paris avant-garde impressed him, and he returned to Budapest with a new outlook. In 1909, he joined the group of Hungarian artists known as the Eight, whose work departed from the conventions of local painting to explore a new, modern visual language. In the 1920s, Czóbel exhibited his work in Budapest, Berlin, and New York; he moved to Paris in 1925 and, after World War II, split his time between Hungary and Paris.