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Ούγκο Σέιμπερ
(1873
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1950) |
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Hugo
Scheiber
(1873
-
1950) |
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Hugó Scheiber (born
September 29, 1873 in Budapest – died there March 7,
1950) was a Hungarian modernist painter.
Hugó Scheiber was brought from Budapest to Vienna at the
age of eight where his father worked as a sign painter
for the Prater Theater. At fifteen, he returned with his
family to Budapest and began working during the day to
help support them and attending painting classes at the
School of Design in the evening, where Henrik Papp was
one of his teachers. He completed his studies in 1900.
His work was at first in a post-Impressionistic style
but from 1910 onward showed his increasing interest in
German Expressionism and Futurism. This made it of
little interest to the conservative Hungarian art
establishment.
However, in 1915 he met the great Italian avant-gardist
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the two painters became
close friends. Marinetti invited him to join the
Futurist Movement. The uniquely modernist style that he
developed was, however, closer to German Expressionism
than to Futurism and eventually drifted toward an
international art deco manner similar to Erté’s. In
1919, he and his friend Béla Kádar held an exhibition at
the Hevesy Salon in Vienna. It was a great success and
at last caused the Budapest Art Museum to acquire some
of Scheiber’s drawings. Encouraged, Scheiber came back
to live in Vienna in 1920.
A turning point in Scheiber's career came a year later,
when Herwarth Walden, founder of Germany's leading
avant-garde periodical, Der Sturm, and of the Sturm
Gallery in Berlin, became interested in Scheiber's work.
Scheiber moved to Berlin in 1922, and his paintings soon
appeared regularly in Walden's magazine and elsewhere.
Exhibitions of his work followed in London, Rome, La
Paz, and New York.
Scheiber's move to Germany coincided with a significant
exodus of Hungarian artists to Berlin, including Lászlo
Moholy-Nagy and Sándor Bortnyik. There had been a major
split in ideology among the Hungarian avant-garde. The
Constructivist and leader of the Hungarian avantgarde,
Lajos Kassák (painted by Hugó Scheiber in 1930) believed
that art should relate to all the needs of contemporary
humankind. Thus he refused to compromise the purity of
his style to reflect the demands of either the ruling
class or socialists and communists. The other camp
believed that an artist should be a figurehead for
social and political change.
The fall out and factions that resulted from this
politicisation resulted in most of the Hungarian
avantgardists leaving Vienna for Berlin. Hungarian
émigrés made up one of the largest minority groups in
the German capital and the influx of their painters had
a significant effect on Hungarian and international art.
Apart from the political activists, there were
independent Modernists such as Scheiber and Kádár, who
hoped to find fertile ground for their aesthetic and
social idealism. Hugó Scheiber, among others, suddenly
found himself in the upper echelons of the dynamic
Berlin art world. Another turning point of Scheiber's
career came in 1926, with the New York exhibition of the
Société Anonyme, organized by Katherine Dreier. Scheiber
and other important avantgarde artists from more than
twenty-three countries were represented. In 1933,
Scheiber was invited by Marinetti to participate in the
great meeting of the Futurists held in Rome in late
April 1933, Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Futurista where he
was received with great enthusiasm. Gradually, the
Hungarian artists began to return home, particularly
with the rise of Nazism in Germany. Kádar went back from
Berlin in about 1932 and Scheiber followed in 1934.
He was then at the peak of his powers and had a special
flair in depicting café and cabaret life in vivid
colors, sturdily abstracted forms and spontaneous brush
strokes. Scheiber depicted cosmopolitan modern life
using stylized shapes and expressive colors. His
preferred subjects were cabaret and street scenes, jazz
musicians, flappers, and a series of self-portraits
(usually with a cigar). A highly prolific workman, he
produced well over 1500 works (nearly 1300 are still
listed on www.artnet.com), his principal media being
gouache and oil. He was a member of the prestigious New
Society of Artists (KUT—Képzőművészek Új Társasága)and
seems to have weathered Hungary’s post-World-War-II
transition to state-communism without difficulty. He
continued to be well regarded,eventually even receiving
the posthumous honor of having one of his images used
for a Soviet postage stamp (see image above). Hugó
Scheiber died in Budapest in 1950. |
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