ATELIER 17/1927-1965 / Jacques Lipchitz, Yves Tanguy, etc. SCHOOL OF PARIS/1945-1960 / Jean Degottex, Georges Mathieu, Nicolas de Staël, etc. NEW REALITIES / 1946-1956 / Etienne Béothy, Marcelle Cahn, César Domela, Antoine Pevsner, etc.
“It was in Portugal that I learned to paint landscapes better, and that I understood my Hungarian sources, because the Portuguese beaches reminded me of the light of my country on the shores of Lake Balaton.” – Arpad Szenes
Arpad Szenes is born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1897. He will be one of the most visible representatives of the Ecole de Paris, a group of artists, often very different from one another, who worked in Paris during the forties and avowed a “non-figurative” style of painting.
Arpad Szenes studies art at the Free Academy in Budapest (1918). Here, he discovers international contemporary art, the music of Bartok, and the avant-garde work of Lajos Kassák. In this same city, his first solo exhibition (abstract paintings) is mounted in 1922.
Coming to Paris in 1925, he exhibits regularly at the Salon des Surindépendants. Arpad Szenes meets Maria Elena Vieira da Silva at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière, which the two artists attend; they marry the following year. In 1931, with his wife, he works and creates engravings under Hayter at Atelier 17, where he mixes with the Surrealists who will influence his work.
In search of purity and transparency, Szenes’s refined work is held within the limits of the transition between figurative and abstract. Szene is attracted by the invisible, by the movement of the world hidden behind forms and appearances. For him, painting contains a form of modesty which excludes any explosion of Expressionism. The couple make numerous voyages, particularly in Latin America. He will live there (Brazil) during the Second World War, until 1947. There is a great complicity between the two artists: he, extrovert and sociable; she, reserved and restrained. An amorous man, Arpad Szenes will make many portraits, drawings and paintings of his wife. A museum in Lisbon is dedicated to the couple’s works.
The art of Szenes, generally inspired by the landscape, suggested landscape, shows the artist’s extreme sensitivity to exploring the moods and sensations of light. Arpad Szenes will take French nationality in 1959. Despite the discretion and modesty that characterise him, Szenes asserts himself, in the Sixties, as a painter of significance, making innumerable exhibitions in France and abroad, with his work being acquired by many museums.
Arpad Szenes is born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1897. He will be one of the most visible representatives of the 
