Zsó­fia Kiss-Szemán: The Slo­vak Lohen­grin On the Pic­ture of Ber­ta­lan Pór Titled Com­po­si­tion

Ber­ta­lan Pór (Bábaszék/Babiná pri Krupine, 1880 Budapest, 1964) is one of the excel­lent rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Hun­gar­i­an avan­t-­garde art. He was mem­ber of the group of Eights estab­lished in 1911, and the Hun­gar­i­an his­to­ry of art con­sid­ers him to be an excel­lent por­trait painter. Pór played an impor­tant role in the for­ma­tion of the Hun­gar­i­an art, in the cre­ation of con­struc­tivism in the first two decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

His work titled Com­po­si­tion in the pos­ses­sion of the Gallery of the City of Bratisla­va was made in 1930, prob­a­bly in Sliaè and the city bought it from the painter him­self togeth­er with Pór’ Al­bum in con­nec­tion with the exhi­bi­tion of the painter in Bratisla­va in 1934. The paint­ing and the Al­bum are from that long peri­od of Ber­ta­lan Pór (ap­prox. 1927–1948), when except for por­trait­s, he paint­ed main­ly sym­bol­i­cal shep­herd and bull com­po­si­tion­s.
Exam­in­ing the work it is entire­ly evi­dent that the sym­bol of the bull, the shep­herd, the ani­mal is not only the embod­i­ment of an idea, but also a uni­ver­sal sym­bol for Pór.
Their sources are from the one side real mem­o­ries of his youth, and from the other side land­scapes remind­ing shep­herd idyl­l. The pic­tures sym­bol­i­cal­ly rep­re­sent the mood and atmos­phere of the age. Through these fig­ures of men and ani­mals Pór want­ed to express his human desires, his rela­tion­ship with the world, dis­com­fort of the age.
Ber­ta­lan Pór’s Com­po­si­tion is a true mas­ter­piece of the col­lec­tion of the Gallery of the City of Bratislava, that is one of the most excel­lent paint­ing of his long, mo­re than two decades of work­ing peri­od.