Zoltán Palugyay
Hello everyone. On this beautiful day we prepared something great for you. Are you ready? This month, thanks to Europeana (you haven't heard of them? Check them immediately!) every Tuesday and every Sunday we will be featuring spectacular artworks from cultural institutions across Europe. Each work, whether it’s an instantly recognisable masterpiece or a little known but unforgettable treasure, was shared by a European country as part of the Europeana 280 campaign. The campaign celebrates Europe’s shared art heritage by exploring the diverse and magnificent artworks that have contributed to it. If you’d like to learn more about Europeana 280, follow #Europeana280 on social media.
Today we share this beautiful piece by Slovakian artist, Zoltán Palugyay. His life’s work, considered a formative pillar of Slovakia’s modern art, ended prematurely when he tragically died before age forty. During his short life, he came to be of one mind with the Slovak modern. He studied and stayed in Budapest, Krakow (yea Poland!!), Munich, and Paris. His European education inspired him to paint both modern and traditional Slovak work. He exhibited jointly with Janko Alexy and Miloš A. Bazovský throughout the 1930s in the towns and villages of an awakening Slovakia. Palugyay’s style began to meld the new and the old. While he never forsook the secessionist-expressionist style, he also developed balladic image of domestic lyric prose and surrealist poetry. Essentially, he took the psychology of Edvard Munch and the symbolism of Paul Gauguin and wrapped them in the fluidity of the Slovak landscape. The enlarged detail in Landscape with Flowers (Nirvana) became the iconic archetype for a series of Palugyay’s paintings in his most productive period in the 1930s. His stylization of shapes and colors, in a reeling line of secessionist rhythm and tones ostensibly decorative, paradoxically combine to underline the picture’s symbolic message.