Bela Kadar began his career as an artist in Budapest by painting murals. Budapest was a city bustling with cultural and artistic life in the first decade of the twentieth century. In January 1913 the National Salon held an exhibition by the Futurists and Expressionists, mostly from the collection of Herwarth Walden; a writer and patron of the avant-garde movement in Berlin . In Spring that same year, Artists’ House organised its international exhibition of works by important Expressionists and Cubists, as well as by the representatives of the various Hungarian trends, including Bela Kadar himself.



In the wake of the First World War however, and its tragic political outcomes, the promising process that could have made modern art take root in Hungary was interrupted for a long period. Though not initially persecuted politically, Kadar, due to his leftist commitments, found himself in a void in Budapest; without money, supportive friends or sympathising artists. Having already made two pilgrimages to Paris (the first by foot due to insufficient funds), and Berlin by 1910, he was keen to appear on international testing grounds, both existentially and professionally, and in 1918 he left his family behind to try himself in Western Europe.



Kadar’s first important exhibition came in October 1923 at Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm. In the bustling metropolis of 1920s Berlin, Der Sturm gallery was the seismic epicentre of the avant-garde and the burgeoning visual arts scene in that city.



During the course of the Berlin years, Kadar’s earlier style changed: the emotionally charged and powerful graphic tone that characterised his work before the 1920s was replaced with a more romantic mood. Elements of folk tale and fantasy gained prominence whilst his subject matter became more narrative. Influenced by the German Expressionists exhibiting at Der Sturm, especially Heinrich Campendonk and Der Blaue Reiter’s Franz Marc, Kadar depicted rustic village scenes within primary compositions. His surrealistic dream imagery was more akin to Marc Chagall’s compositions however.



Having had his work introduced in America in 1926 through a New York dealer, the New York Times and the Brooklyn Times praised Kadar’s work, as did the American critic and collector Christian Binton, who recognised the private symbolism in Kadar’s work, mentioning the Jewish mysticism in the village scenes; ‘a genre treated with great force and imagination’.



In his work of the early 1920s, Kadar brought together the rural traditions of Hungarian folklore, the decorative genius of the country’s renowned folk arts and his own private Jewish symbolism, with stylistic elements derived from Cubo-futurism, Expressionism and Constructivism.