KÁDÁR, BÉLA (Hungarian, 1877-1955)

In 1910 Kádár undertook journeys to both centres of contemporary art, Paris and Berlin. He also visited Moscow in 1912, where he met Filippo Marinetti, Futurism’s leading poet and polemicist. His many travels made him aware of Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism and Expressionism, all of which he put to his own personal use. He returned to Hungary but, disillusioned by the change of regime after the First World War, he left to settle in Berlin, where he shared a studio with Marc Chagall for a short time.
His work there was recognised and promoted by Herwarth Walden, the founder of the Berlin journal Der Sturm and champion of the expressionists. When Catherine Dreier arranged for his work to be exhibited in New York in 1926 at the Societe Anonyme alongside that of Arp, de Chirico, Kandinsky and Marc, Kádár had found an international audience and was regarded as a master of contemporary art.

With the rise of Nazism, being Jewish, he chose to return to Hungary and after 1945 consecutive regimes considered his work too radical and decadent to be shown. Despite the repression of his work and his increasingly blindness Kádár carried on painting until his death at the age of 79.