It’s funny how you sometimes come across things.
I had heard the song Budapest from George Ezra recently and had decided to share it on my Sunday music interlude. It just has an infectious sound that seemed like a good way to start what looks to be a beautiful day. Plus I liked the fact that he lists Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly as influences– kind of unexpected from a 20-something Brit.
So I began looking for something visual to accompany this lead-in to the music and punched in Budapest painting into my search engine. Up came many lovely watercolor-y images of the beautiful grand riverfront along the Danube. They were nice but tucked in among them was a rougher, more modernistic cityscape that really stuck out to me.
Red roofs. Simple forms and dark linework. A path leading in and up. Even the tree that divided the upper right section of the scene looked familiar. It looked like something that could have easily been tucked away somewhere in my own body of work.
The painting, shown above was titled Taban Cityscape in Budapest and the artist was listed as Sandor Galimberti. Looking deeper, there was little info on Galimbert’s life except that he was Hungarian, born in 1883. From a rough translation on a Hungarian site, I gleaned that he studied with Matisse and had began to achieve notoriety for his work around Europe before World War I. Married to another artist, he lived in Paris then finally Amsterdam before returning to Hungary to enlist in the army during the early days of the war. In 1915, Learning that his wife had contracted lung cancer, Galimberti returns from the battlefield and his wife then dies. Hour later, he takes his own life at the age of 32.
Yet another tragic story of what may have been an epic career cut short. Looking at his work online (including his final work, Amsterdam, shown at the bottom) I am impressed on so many levels and can only imagine what may have come from an artist just reaching his maturity in the aftermath of the war. We might be talking of him in the same terms as Matisse and Picasso and other modern masters. But a tragic fate intervened and he is little known outside of a few certain circles.
So what began as a simple search for an image gives me a new artist to wonder at and study- perhaps my Hungarian cousin? So many hidden treasures in this world. Enjoy the song, enjoy the day and be glad for those things that bring you joy.
Redtree Times 