Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1892 Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary)

Died: 1959 Penzance, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1936

Biography

Painter and illustrator István Szegedi-Szüts was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) on 7 December 1893. He trained at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, after which he taught in Csongrad, near Szeged, before serving as an artillery officer on the Romanian front during the First World War. Hospitalised by a bomb until 1919, Szegedi-Szüts evaded the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Béla Kun Communist regime (the coup d'état that established the Hungarian Soviet Republic which only lasted four months), after which he returned to Csongrad (Waterhouse, 2018). He taught drawing there for some time, and in 1926 held his first exhibition of 115 graphics at Budapest Mentor Gallery. In 1929, he visited London and held a solo exhibition, Paintings, Drawings and Etchings by Mr. István Szegedi-Szüts, at Gieves Gallery at 22 Old Bond Street. Included amongst the 76 pictures on show was an expressionist portrait of the Hungarian author Dezső Szabó. A review in The Times compared the artist to El Greco and stated that ‘originality and versatility are to be found in the exhibition,’ with pictures that are ‘full of energy’ and ‘well controlled from a formal point of view’ (The Times, 1929).

In England Szegedi-Szüts later published a ‘wordless novel’ about his wartime experiences entitled My War, published by London-based publisher John Lane/The Bodley Head in 1931. The book contained 206 ink and brushwork drawings, with simple strokes evoking the feeling of a rapid wartime journal. It explores the main character, Isiko, and his disillusionment brought about by the brutalities of war. In his introduction to the book, English novelist Ralph Hale Mottram stated that Szegedi-Szüts is ‘one of the chroniclers of a fundamental change in human nature’ (Beronä, 2008; Szegedi-Szüts, 1931). While published in England, it has been considered that the book’s ‘pictorial account of an ordinary soldier’s life and death in the First World War is Hungarian in experience, concept and execution’ (Waterhouse, 2018). In 1933 Szegedi-Szüts produced a humorous cartoon short film, Legi Titanok (Battle of Titans), with each frame drawn by the artist in Hungary but later given a British Board of Control Certificate. The cartoon’s success interested film producers at the Gaumont British Picture Corporation who had seen it and wished to establish a European industry in competition to Disney. Szegedi-Szüts was, however, refused an extension of his work permit in London, due to the project's eventual failure and the closure of the cartoon department (Waterhouse, 2018), and hence, left London.

In 1936 Szegedi-Szüts returned to London for the first time in three years and married Gwynedd Jones-Perry, another painter, a year later. From then onward, the couple lived in Caunce Head near Mullion, Cornwall, and one of their wedding presents was Alfred Wallis’ Three Sailing Vessels on a River, given to them by Jim Ede, who was then a junior curator at the Tate and who purchased many of Wallis’ paintings. Even though Szegedi-Szüts exhibited with the Newlyn Society of Artists and the Penwith Society of Arts, he ‘was never quite part of the burgeoning St Ives scene’ (Waterhouse, 2018). At the advent of the Second World War he and his wife were suspected as ‘enemy aliens’, and after being questioned by the authorities they were made to move away from their home in a 'protected area' between 1940 and 1941, taking refuge in Gwynedd’s aunt’s home in Malvern, Worcestershire. When they were allowed to return to Cornwall, they billeted an RAF airman flying Mosquitos from a nearby airfield, from where Szegedi-Szüts also helped pull a crashed pilot from his aircraft (Waterhouse, 2018; Cornishman, 1941).

István Szegedi-Szüts died in Penzance Hospital, Penzance, England in 1959, following a period of failing health and ‘an inability to obtain paid work in Cornish institutions’ (Waterhouse, 2018). Michael Snow, the artist friend to whom Gwynedd left her husband’s archive when she died in 1982, distributed his works to various institutions, but mostly to the Petofi Irodalmi Museum in Budapest. In UK public collections, Szegedi-Szüts’ self-portrait is held in the Falmouth Art Gallery Collection, and Legi Titanok is held in the British Film Institute Collections. A first-edition copy of My War is held in the British Library. His narrative featured in Robert Waterhouse's book, Their Safe Haven: Hungarian Artists in Britain from the 1930s (2018).