Bertalan Pór

Born and raised in Budapest, Bertalan Pór studied at Budapest’s School of Industrial Design and Munich’s Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule. He moved to Nagybánya, Hungary, in 1896 to create a new artist colony devoted to the idea of a Hungarian national art. In 1909, Pór helped found the Eight, an avant-garde Post-Impressionist artist collective that shaped Hungarian modernist art; his own work was marked by Cubist and (as evidenced by the vibrant colors of The Family) Fauvist sensibilities. His 1919 Proletarians of the World, Unite! gave public voice to his revolutionary sympathies; following the suppression of the Bela Kun’s 1919 Hungarian Communist revolution, Pór became a political refugee, shuttling among Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He returned to Budapest in 1948 to take a teaching position under the new Communist regime.