According to István Eigel, the greatest influence on his art was Dante’s The Divine Comedy, which he found in a factory yard as a child. He kept the book for many years and, after learning Italian, read it.
His painting, as well as his outlook on life, was also influenced by Aurél Bernáth, who regarded his students – at least Eigel and Klára Tassy – as intellectual equals. In an interview with Eigel, Tibor Gyurkovics observed that Eigel’s paintings often “bear Bernáth’s influence, sometimes concealed, sometimes more openly.” He respected Rudnay, loved Bernáth, devoted considerable attention to the work of István Szőnyi, and named Lajos Szalay as his master, Balázs Feledy writes in an article. Eigel placed great value on “continuous self-development,” but disliked artists who shifted erratically between different movements over the course of their careers.
For a long time he hoped that things in Hungary would take a turn for the better after the war. As he put it, “Two years were enough for Hantai to realise that darkness was descending again; I kept on hoping for decades.” Given the circumstances, he was able to travel relatively often, but he never wanted to leave Hungary permanently; indeed, he tried to persuade his émigré friends of the need to return home, among them Simon Hantai. Being constructive by nature, he tried to recognise what was valuable and beautiful in his surroundings and felt that if change was to come, he had to do something for it where he was.
The artists’ colony at Tápiószele – or, as he called it, “Barbizon on the Tápió” – was an important stage in his artistic development, but he gradually moved away from naturalism, through Impressionist influences, towards a painterly world characterised by a rigorous formal order and “filled with surrealistic-organic forms.”
He had loved the Balaton region since his youth. In the late 1950s, he and his wife spent three summers at Bernáth’s holiday home in Badacsonyörs. Later he also supported the activities of the Balatonboglár Chapel Exhibitions: “The work of the talented people belonging to the group truly deserves not to be overlooked, but to be respected and followed with attention.” Whenever possible, he and his wife spent their summers in the thatched-roof house they bought in Balatonfüred in 1978 – he felt much more a man of the Balaton than a Budapest resident. “Summer belongs to the Balaton, to awakening, contemplation, meditation, great resolutions, and always to calming the heart…” he wrote in connection with one of his exhibitions.
His paintings, however, often have a dramatic atmosphere, and his compositions are imbued with humanism: “It is the human being who interests him. The human face. The rich human face. He is interested in character, searching for the secrets of personality; he wants to uncover a fate hidden behind a grimace, a tragedy concealed by a smile, a failure disguised by a lofty tilt of the head. This is true of his painting, but especially of his drawings. His drawings are always, always about human beings; he creates people, and above all human faces,” Károly Szakonyi writes of the painter in his essay Emberarcok (Human Faces).
His handling of colour reflected his character – he did not favour contrasts or strident colours – and he was able to sustain the dramatic effect of his compositions even through the use of harmonious colours. “He draws masterfully, with inspiration; with a few lines, some shading and suggestive strokes, he is capable of creating a magnificent atmosphere.” He worked with equal assurance in pen, ink and brush, as well as on his large-scale public works with decorative functions, in which the dominant concern was never a “current political message,” but rather the solution of problems arising from the formal construction of the work of art.
This approach to art, free of ideological currents – or, conversely, receptive to the most diverse currents – is exemplified by the fact that as early as 1977 he produced his collage depicting San Marco in Venice, while in the mid-1990s he also painted the oil painting Mennybemenetel (Ascension) for the chapel at Csávoly.
His versatility is also demonstrated by his twenty-four completed mural works, which include works of applied art executed in secco, panel painting, glass, mosaic and marquetry. Among his mosaics, the 1968 Négy évszak (Four Seasons) decorates a wall at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Debrecen; his work Flóra (Flora) can be seen in the town centre of Szentes, while A születés (Birth) is at the Budapest University of Medicine. His two-part sgraffito Századunk (Our Century) is on the wall of an apartment building in Eger, while his large-scale, 300 × 800 cm glass sculpture A hang (The Voice) can be seen at Hungarian Radio.
The Production and Homo Ludens, two tapestries made in 1982, were installed on the walls of the Budapest Opera House, while Kiskunság Dawns, a series of folk-inspired, ornamental marquetry panels with floral motifs created together with his wife in 1987, decorates the walls of the College of Agricultural Sciences in Mezőtúr.
Writing about his 1966 exhibition at the Ernst Museum, critic György Szabó described his art as follows: “It is an art well aware of its own limits and possibilities, one that does not lose its bearings even amid the considerable turmoil of contemporary aesthetic life, does not succumb to the temptations of spectacular (but unfounded) adventures, and does not undertake tasks beyond its powers; yet neither does it shrink from meeting the new demands imposed by artistic development.” He continued: “It therefore develops organically, continuously preserving its most essential constants—humanism, serenity and balance: it is above all this harmony, present in every work and never artificial, that wins the viewer’s sympathy. Equally striking is the conscious purpose behind it, which shows that the two artists are aware not only of their own abilities, but also of the path they have travelled so far.”
His 1981 exhibition at the Műcsarnok, held jointly with his wife, however, received several scathing and often unfair reviews. “The exhibition greets us with paintings that process the discoveries of Cubism with a seventy-year delay. And what is even more surprising: without understanding them. (…) In Eigel’s work there is no question of a conception of space or an interpretation of reality (…) his painting is loud with gestures of would-be modernity and riddled with mannerisms,” József Vadas wrote in the 4 April issue of Élet és Irodalom. According to Gyula Rózsa, meanwhile: “István Eigel’s current paintings merely make use of the Neo-Realist manner. They use it, that is, wear it out, that is, empty it of meaning.”
From the early 1960s onwards, Eigel was able to study exhibitions in Switzerland and France and shared what he learned from them with his contemporaries. In this way, he played an important role as an intermediary. His painting initially developed in a Constructivist direction, but he also drew on the stylistic features of Surrealism. His works frequently depict absurd, irrational situations. Several are pictures within pictures, surrounding details from masterpieces with contemporary figures. Other paintings are paraphrases of classical works (e.g. Majális [Picnic in May]).
In his 1991 interview 50 kérdés Eigel Istvánhoz (50 Questions for István Eigel), Tibor Gyurkovics observed that the painter “committed himself to none of the more recent movements; indeed, as a consequence of all the empty posturing, he sees the danger of disintegration threatening painting. Eigel wants to preserve the grand unity of the picture—while at the same time incorporating into it the countless elements of emotional vibrations, intellectual reflections and subtle shifts of mood. And above all, he believes that art is ethical.”
According to András Fecske, a change in Eigel’s style occurred with his 1965 painting Holdfogyatkozás (Lunar Eclipse). The painting is abstract: “the moon and the geometric structure associated with it further intensify the formal complexity of an already difficult composition, and here we can sense for the first time the palette that would later become characteristic of his painting, ranging from greens to yellows and centred on browns; the composition that appears like a cropped fragment yet remains sculptural; and finally, the presence of spatiality, uncertain perhaps, but unmistakable.”
The 1970 oil collage Gyár (Factory) displays Constructivist stylistic features, while Kékszakállú (Bluebeard), a rigidly structured oil painting from the same year, appears to be a synthesis of Futurism and Constructivism, with a strong influence from Barcsay. In Zsámbék, painted not long afterwards, he combined his Constructivist approach with the visual language of Op Art.
Fecske, however, interprets the 1973 Kállák (Calla Lilies) as a move away from non-figurative painting. A gyűlés (The Meeting), “with its interchangeable, identical heads and figures that could be catapulted from their swivel chairs, is clearly intended as a distorting mirror of a Party meeting and, with considerable daring, uses the guise of an absurd situation to create a satirical one as well,” Fecske writes.
In the still life A fekete asztal (The Black Table), he employs a picture-within-a-picture composition: the arrangement of fish seen on the plate is repeated in the background, just as it is in Állatbarát (Animal Lover). In his painting A Mester (The Master), Eigel pays tribute to the memory of his former teacher, Gyula Rudnay. Behind the elderly man with a kindly expression, who faces the viewer, a nude model stands in the studio.
He borrowed the title Az asszony meg a lánya (Two Women) from Alberto Moravia’s world-famous novel, which also alludes to the setting of the painting. His frequently reproduced work Búcsúzik a cirkusz (The Circus Bids Farewell), a collage-like painting from 1982, is likewise set on the sand of a seashore, while Vihar előtt (Before the Storm) is a mature example of his landscape painting.
In Primavera, alongside Botticelli’s Venus, he also recreates several other figures from the Renaissance composition, a device typical of the Transavantgarde. The same is true of his paraphrase of Majális (Picnic in May), which reinterprets Szinyei’s work. This painting, however, divided the critics. Gyula Rózsa, for example, wrote: “the Műcsarnok Majális placed a superbike, half-naked women, a sullied meadow and a headless antique Nike in the positions familiar from Szinyei’s painting. A discerning literary editor would hardly send a feuilleton displaying this level of taste to the printers.”
Following Majális, Eigel turned towards his own childhood. He first painted his own room, depicting himself in a playpen, as well as Anonymus utca (Anonymus Street), a composition portraying his parents in their youth. With A kelengye (The Trousseau), he commemorated his sister, who had awakened his interest in the arts. Two years later, he also painted a portrait of his father. This latter composition strongly resembles his portrait of Rudnay.
His 1995 panel painting Honfoglalás (The Conquest of the Homeland) does not follow traditional representations of the subject. Instead, it presents a historical portrait gallery in which we can recognise such major figures of Hungarian history and culture as Zrínyi, Rákóczi, Deák, Liszt and Attila József.
In his monograph, András Fecske compares Eigel's choked, esoteric tableaux - sometimes walking a narrow path between tragedy and humour - with literary examples such as the prose of Mann and Moravia.
Eigel himself was a frequent publisher. Most of his studies and articles on various subjects appeared in Új idők and Lyukasóra. According to one of his publications in Új Írás, for example, the isolation of Hungarian art from Western European trends began alread before World War II, and was not a result of the social-real era.
He has also planned to write an encyclopaedia of art, experimented with translating Ionesco's and Anouilh's plays into Hungarian, and has written short stories, diaries and memoirs of his American sojourn and other travels.
His 1993 novella A túlsó partról (From the Other Shore) tells the story of a married couple who emigrated to America, whose lives are irrevocably changed when, by chance, a letter from the past comes to light. Their circumstances, fears, struggles and compromises continue the story of the fading of the precious stones that rolled away to foreign lands from Babits’s diamond-scattering woman—occasionally plunged once more into the fire of the past, briefly flaring into brilliance, before finally going dark forever.
His 1994 Amerikai napló (American Diary) “presents us with a quick-witted picaro, free from the fictitious constraints of the esoteric world, constantly thinking in new analogies and searching for fresh impressions. The resignation that permeates the pages of the diary stems from the painful realisation that most of his old companions had formed new intellectual attachments in their new surroundings; for them, Hungarian culture had become no more than an aerial root, while they now found their real points of support in the New World,” Fecske writes in his monograph. During his journey, Eigel also had the opportunity to explore the collections of New York’s museums, but he had a low opinion of American art of the preceding decades. He held the culture and art of his broader homeland, Europe, in much higher regard.
Eigel’s painting “conjured up a peculiar world in which memories of childhood and adulthood radiated a humane philosophy, a sense of warmth and a Hellenic culture,” Imre D. Nagy wrote in Új Horizont (2000/5) following István Eigel’s death. According to his close friend Károly Szakonyi, perhaps only in Chekhov could one find the same love of life that characterised Eigel’s personality and was also evident in his drawings: a complete acceptance of life, with all its tragedy and grotesqueness. “He always sought to evoke the human being—the tragic, eternal human being whom history cannot sweep away,” read the obituary in Magyar Nemzet.
[2015]