Background
Piroska Szántó was born on December 7, 1913, in Kiskunfélegyháza, Bacs-Kiskun, Hungary.
Piroska Szántó was born on December 7, 1913, in Kiskunfélegyháza, Bacs-Kiskun, Hungary.
Piroska Szántó started her studies at the College of Applied Arts and Fine Arts in 1931, then in 1932 she enrolled at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts.
Piroska's first solo exhibition was arranged in 1946. The intimate relationship with nature, despite stylistic changes, remained an essential feature of her art. These efforts were included in the synthesis of her large gobelin of the Cantata Profana.
In the 1950's, illustrations of the work of Villon, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Kipling, Gyula Krúdy, and Miklós Radnóti represented a livelihood for the artist. The events of 1956 were recorded in crude reports. In the second half of the 1950s, new stylistic features appeared in her works. Sparkling colors were forced into constructive black lines.
Although her artistic thinking was characterized by the tendency to work on topics in series, however, since the 1960s the artist has often associated technical and material use with the same thing as image building. Thus, for example, the constructive landscaping of the activists of the early 1960s was born. The confrontation with the rapidly deteriorating folk culture and the overthrow of traditional moral values inspired the roadside crosses, the curved pléchrists, the cemetery burial pyramids with lapidary simplicity painted from the late 1960s.
In similar experiences and memories of war, a series of monumental, passion-inspired figures from the pastel-era technique were rooted in the second half of the 1970s by the Bavarian women. In the 1970s, Piroska Szántó started the series of Lovers of Piroska Szántó's life course, which was divided into two distinct groups.
In the early pieces of her series, they were drawn with lines, gold, silver, black, and white, decorated embracing figures both thematically and stylistically. The pieces of the second series were created in the last decade of the artistic career and, in contrast to the cool incandescing of early works - even from postmodern painting - richer in colors and the so-called tambourine photographs, it also showed more sensuously in the matrix of each other's tense pairs. Her literary tales revealed the turning points of her life and her contemporaries. The artist died on August 2, 1998 in Budapest, Hungary.
Piroska Szántó took part in left-wing political activities.
Piroska Szántó adhered to the artistic traditions of Surrealism.
In 1934 Piroska Szántó joined the Socialist Artistic Group and then the Society of Socialist Artists in 1939 - 1940. From 1945 to 1948, she was a member of the European School until its dissolution.
Piroska Szántó was married to Gusztáv Seiden but the couple broke up. Then she married the poet Istvan Vas.
