Background
Endre Balint was born on October 27, 1914, in Budapest, Hungary.
Endre Balint was born on October 27, 1914, in Budapest, Hungary.
Endre trained at the School of Applied Arts between 1930 and 1934, went on to study in János Vaszary's private school and then became a pupil of Vilmos Aba-Novák.
From 1936 Endre spent several summers in Szentendre, accompanied with his friend Lajos Vajda and artistic peers. In 1945 he founded the artistic group European School and painted recollections of World War II in its aftermath with powerful gestures. In 1947 Balint was a participant of the second surrealistic world expo in Paris. Affected positively by that event, his paintings of the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s became populated with mythological creatures: elves, kobolds, and anthropomorphic organic creatures. Towards the middle of the 1950s, he produced drawings that eventually took him to setting his imagination free - with depictions of a horse-headed mouse, wheel-forms, fragments of Swabian and Arabic female figures.
After staying temporarily in Paris, he lived there on a permanent basis from 1957 to 1961. In 1958 Édition Labergerie published the Jerusalem Bible with more than a thousand of Bálint's illustrations, and that aided him in developing his typical late artistic style. From 1959 onward he created an album titled "The Jerusalem Bible", containing more than 1,000 illustrations, and painted his most valued paintings one after the other, including the "Miraculous Fishing", the "Dream in the Public Park", and "I Walked Here Sometime I-II", all in 1960, illustrating a form of late surrealism. Moreover, he incorporated memories of his childhood with internal landscapes from his dreams often producing frightening figures and shapes.
By the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, the epic nature of his paintings had been replaced by the depiction of motifs of symbolic value growing increasingly macabre and grotesque. Besides his artwork, Balint also had numerous writings and memoirs published in a number of volumes documenting his life in the 1970s and early 1980s. Bálint experimented with many techniques and media, including collages, stage designs, linoleum engravings, plaster engravings, montages, and book illustrations. The artist died in Budapest in 1986.
unknown title
Magic Night at Szentendre
Jonas and the whale
House at Szentendre
Circus Woman
My Room at the Bindendorfs
Homage to Franz Kafka
Still Life
Vision at Rouen
Houses at Hastings
Stone Bird
De profundis
Smoking
Dream in the People's Park
Grotesque Funeral
At Candle-light
Still Life with Fish
Statue in a Cemetery
Still Life
Homesickness
Root Dance
Self-Portrait
The Birth of Prometheus
Self-Portrait
In Memoriam Bartók
Dark Blue World
Endre's works combined elements of Surrealism and Constructivism with traditions of folk art and the tools of folk craft. He liked to use photomontage in grotesque compositions on his posters, complemented with excellent drawing.
Bálint was a member of the artist colony of Szentendre in the 1930’s. In 1945 he belonged to the most important group of modern painters in Hungary, called “Európai Iskola” (European School).
