Artportal.hu

JAKOBY, Gyula [Július Jakoby] Painter (Kassa 28th March, 1903 – Kassa [Košice, CSZ], 15th April, 1985)   1923: The Free School of Jenő Krón in Kassa; 1926-1928: Hungarian College of Fine Arts in Budapest; master: István Réti; he was a member of the Kazinczy Society between 1938 and 1944, the Svojina between 1945 and 1949, then from 1949 of the Society of Czechoslovakian Artists. 1934: Award of the city of Kassa; 1963: Merit for Outstanding Work; 1968: Meritorious Artist Award. He lived and worked in Kassa from 1928, up until his death. His artistic program began in 1928m at this time his dramatic impressiveness was conjoined with the dynamics of forms, and the expressiveness of color. This period of his is considered as dealing primarily with everyday topics, peripheries, life images, and the themes of religion. After 1945 he place the expressive reflection of his art into the foreground, and reached even segments of abstract expressionism. Within the framework of his figurative compositions, and self-portraits he surpassed traditional mentalities present in the fine arts of the period, he disregards characteristic modes of portraying the human figure, and face, instead he produces exposing, complex figures, which do not lack either humor, nor irony. Especially during the course of the 1960’s his sensibility towards color strengthens, and the cohesion of forms almost ceases in his compositions. The mimics of a given face, the gestures of a hand, the movements of an arm became more important to him in his works, than the portrayal of the physiological characteristics of the figure, that is their unique personification. Within the grimaces, deformed human faces the viewer can discover the artist’s own portrait, and his sarcastic sense of humor. The place of the grotesque however is slowly taken over by that of the tragic. The figures of his later works cannot thus be identified in neither genres, nor content, which are painfully deformed, lonely, and therefore become immeasurably vulnerable and defenseless. The analogy, in a physical sense ceases to exits; his self-portrait became more and more introverted, being expressive and symbolic at once, thus everything becoming the symbolization of the deepest inner self. The art of Jákoby can hardly be related to any other Czechoslovakian artist of his era, he produced an autonomous, autotelic oeuvre in his solitude in Kassa. (translated by: Vladimir Végh)