Gyula Sajó was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1918. He was an established artist and teacher in Budapest until the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, after which he escaped with his family to England. There he set up the Atelier Art Group in Worthing and exhibited widely.
Painter, graphic artist and teacher Gyula Sajó was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) in 1918. He studied art and architecture at the Academy of Applied Art, Budapest from 1935–41. In 1943 he was awarded a prestigious scholarship to Helsinki University, thereafter becoming a professor of Architecture at the Technical University of Budapest. As a result of the unstable political and economic situation in Hungary, Gyula and his wife, Erzsbet, moved to Austria in 1944, and there he established himself as an artist. They returned to Hungary at the end of the war, however, just before the Communists seized power of the country. Having lived in the West, Sajó was viewed with suspicion, but he nevertheless enjoyed a burgeoning career as an exhibiting artist in Budapest, and he took up a professorship at the Academy of Applied Arts there. In 1956, the Hungarian Uprising against Communism fundamentally changed their lives, and on 4 December 1956 Sajó and his family fled Hungary and returned to Austria. Shortly after they immigrated to England.
Sajó and his family initially lived in East London and his early paintings of the UK capture what he could see from his window, the rooftops and docklands of Wapping with Tower Bridge in the background. He had his first breakthrough in the art world when he submitted three paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1958, one of which sold on the first day. He subsequently become a regular exhibitor with the Royal Academy, and held a solo show, Water-Colours and Drawings by Gyula Sajó, at Foyle’s Art Gallery, London, also in 1958. A year later, the family moved to Worthing in West Sussex, where he discovered and learnt to appreciate the local scenery of downs and coast, which became favoured subjectmatter. He also enjoyed the milder weather that enabled him to paint outdoors all year round, something he was unable to do in Hungary (Artist’s website). Soon after his arrival in West Sussex, Sajó held a solo show entitled Gyula Sajó: An Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Wood Carvings at Worthing Art Gallery (1959). He also showed locally at the Ditchling Gallery, Ditchling (1962).
Sajó became a naturalised British citizen in 1962, and in 1965 he founded the Atelier Art Group, which remained a significant local art foundation, where he taught and exhibited until his death in 1989. In 1967, Gyula Sajó: 10 Years in England was held at Arun Art Centre in nearby Arundel. The Daily Telegraph art critic Terence Mullaly called the exhibition ‘a tribute both to the artist and to the gallery’ (Mullaly, 1967). Between 1964 and 1987 Sajó participated in several BBC interviews and television broadcasts. In 1983 he became a member of The Pastel Society, the same year he exhibited again with Worthing Museum and Art Gallery for the Gyula Sajó: 25 Years in England show. In 1988 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Delaware, USA, and in 1989 the Albert Einstein Special Peace Award with the International Academy Foundation.
Gyula Sajó died in Worthing, England in 1989. A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Prints by the Late Dr. Gyula Sajó was held at Bloomsbury and Dixon Galleries, London the same year, and in 1995 Worthing Museum and Art Gallery displayed his work from their collections. Works by Gyula Sajó are held in UK public collections including The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, and the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust, Brighton & Hove. Posthumously, Terrence Mullaly observed that Sajó ‘was an archetypal master of the Hungarian tradition of painting’, with ‘a sense of colour rare in British art’ (Buckman, 2006).