Background
Bertalan Pór was born in 1880 in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family.
Bertalan Pór was born in 1880 in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family.
Bertalan was a student of László Gyulay in the School of Industrial Design in Budapest. There was no art academy in his native city, so he went to Munich, Bavaria to study. In the early 20th century, Pór went to Paris, where he studied with Jean Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian.
After graduating from Académie Julian, Bertalan returned to Hungary and began his career, becoming a popular portrait painter. He also worked as a fresco painter. In 1909 Pór joined with the group The Eight, which had an exhibit "New Pictures" in Budapest that same year. They first showed as The Eight in 1911, representing the advanced edge of Hungarian art culture. Other members of the group were Károly Kernstok, Róbert Berény, Dezső Czigány, Béla Czóbel, Ödön Márffy, Dezső Orbán, and Lajos Tihanyi. Although the painters held only three shows together, they took part in events with new music and literature, and were influential through the First World War. They shaped modernist art in the country.
Paris was closed during the Great War to artists from "non-allied" nations. After the fall of the Hungarian Democratic Republic in 1919, Pór was one of the many artists who emigrated; he left for Czechoslovakia. He primarily painted landscapes and pictures of animals. During that period abroad, Pór also traveled to France, Italy, and the Soviet Union on artistic patronage. Bertalan settled in Paris in 1938, where there were numerous other Hungarian emigrants in the artistic circles, including a younger generation.
From 1944 to 1946 after the Liberation of Paris, Pór worked with Ervin Marton and the writer György Bölöni on reorganizing the Hungarian House, a center for the emigrants artistic community. Artists ran it together as a place to present their works in contemporary art. Bertalan continued to be involved with the Hungarians in Paris. In 1948, after the rise of the communist government in Hungary, Pór was offered a position in the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He returned to the capital as a teacher. Except for travel, he remained there, teaching and painting, for the rest of his life. Bertalan died in 1964 in Budapest, Hungary.
Currently, The Hungarian National Gallery holds one of Por's oil self-portraits from the 1910s, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York has his lithograph, "Proletarians of the World, Unite!", created in 1919.
Landscape in Krahovice
Landscape in the Alföld with Young Men
Landscape
Landscape by a Brook
Self-Portrait
Woman with a Hat
Bull I
Forest Path
Margitka
Longing for Pure Love
Mihály Károlyi
Shepherd and his Lover
Calf
Lights on the Riverside
Child in Red Coat
Sunlit Landscape with Bridge
Bulls
Gypsies
Sermon on the Mountain
Brookside
The Family
Shepherd
Bertalan Pór adhered to the artistic traditions af fauvism, cubism, and expressionism.
Bertalan was a member of The Eight, a movement that united several Hungarian painters in the early twentieth century who represented the radical edge in Budapest.
