Kádár, Béla

Biography

Béla Kádár was born in Budapest in 1877 into a poor jewish family, where he grew up in bilingual (German and Hungarian) environment. At the age of twenty he started to explore Europe on foot, and he met the great cities of Europe, for example Munich, and Paris. While travelling he decided to become a painter. In 1899 he applied at the School of Industrial Design in Budapest, and from 1902 to 1903 he studied at the Art School, where Endre Balló was his teacher. From 1904 he was attending at the Free School in Munich and Budapest. Already in 1906 he had took part with his pastels and drawings on the periodic exhibition of the Art Gallery and the National Saloon.

Kádár’s earliest works were strongly influenced by Béla Iványi-Grünwald (and the Art Nouveau style) and József Rippl-Rónai’s compositional and colour solutions. He observed the paintings on the International Exhibitions of Budapest, the nabis-group’s paintings and the method of post-impressionists sparked his interest. In the 1920 he turned to the expressionism, he appeard in exhibitions in Vienna, in the Belvedere in Hungary, and in the Der Strum Gallery in Berlin in 1924 and 1925.
In the 1930s he painted figurative compositions enriched with neoclassical forms, in the style of Art Deco, and he had great success amoung the audience and the artists as well.