Hollosy SIMON

Founder of the Nagybánya Art School, which had a great influence on the formation of the Transcarpathian School of Painting. He was born in 1857 in the city of Siget (now Sighetu Marmației, Romania). From 1875 to 1876 he studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Budapest, and from 1878 to 1882-at the Munich Academy of Arts. The period of creative formation of the artist fell on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries-it was the period of creation of national art schools in many European countries as opposed to the official academism. For Hungarian (at that time Transcarpathian) and Eastern European art such a creative factor was the famous Nagybánya School (named after the city of Nagybánya, now Baia Mare in Romania), which was established by Hollosy in 1886. At the Nagybánya School young artists from different countries were preparing to enter the Munich Academy. The institution became a centre for young talents who sought to realistically depict the surrounding world with the help of new, non-academic means. For seventeen Munich years Hollosy became famous in Europe as an artist and pedagogue. His most famous works of that period are: “Rákóczi March”, “Zrinyi sally”, “Apostle”, “Field” and others. Later the artist started to hold his summer plein airs in the Transcarpathian Tiachiv, he establishes an art colony, which was called the “Hungarian Barbizon”. Since 1915 Hollosy lived in Tiachiv constantly, created together with his students in the plein air, painted portraits, genre compositions, landscapes. In this last period of creativity, it was the landscape that dominated, it acquired the features of impressionism and certain emotionality: “Outskirts of Tiachiv” (1912), “Landscape near Tiachiv” (1910), “Yard with a cart” (1912), “Yard” (1912), self-portraits, ect. Simon Hollosy created and headed alternative art schools in Munich, Nagybánya and Tiachiv, where more than hundreds of students from all over the world mastered their skills. Among them there are such well-known Russian and Ukrainian artists as M. Dobuzhynskyi, V. Kandinskyi, I. Hrabar, V. Favorskyi, K. Petrov-Vodkin, E. Steinberg, H. Narbut, and others. The artist died in 1918 in Tiachiv. Most of his works are kept in the Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest), some of them-in private collections and Regional museum in Baia Mare, Romania.