Bertalan Pór
1880–1964 · Hungarian modernist painter, member of The Eight
Bertalan Pór (Budapest, 1880 – 1964) was a Hungarian painter associated with the development of modernist art in Hungary. He was a member of The Eight, a group of early twentieth-century Budapest painters who brought Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism into Hungarian art.
Born into a Hungarian Jewish family, Pór began drawing as a child and studied at the School of Industrial Design in Budapest. Because the city had no art academy, he went to Munich, where he worked with Gabriel von Hackl. He later spent a short time with Simon Hollósy at Nagybánya, home of the artists' colony that shaped twentieth-century Hungarian painting.
In Paris he studied with Jean Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. Back in Hungary he became a popular portrait painter and also worked as a fresco painter. He joined The Eight in 1909, and the group first exhibited as such in 1911. Together with Károly Kernstok, Pór absorbed ideas from Fauvism and Cubism. After the fall of the Hungarian Democratic Republic in 1919 he emigrated to Czechoslovakia, where he painted mainly landscapes and animals. He settled in Paris in 1938 and, after the Liberation, helped reorganise the Hungarian House. In 1948 he took a post at the Budapest Academy, where he taught and painted for the rest of his life.
The group's legacy was revisited in exhibitions marking the centenary of its first show in 2011 and 2012.