Polgar Auctionhouse

82nd Christmas Art Auctio

Oil, canvas, 69 x 58, 5 cm.
M.b.l.: Kernstok Károly
Exhibited:
Az Ernst-Muzeum kiallitasai XXVIII. Kernstok Karoly gyujtemenyes kiallitasa 1917
Cat. No.: 87.

There is a returning subject in Karoly Kernstok’s (1843-1940) versatile, thematic art: depicting human labor. As a young artist, he had already been impressed by natural human characterization. During the years he had spent among The Eights (1909-1912), he had preferred abstract compositions about naked bodies, but in the 1910s he returned to one of the eternal subjects; to represent every-day people while working. In 1917 on his one-man exhibition in the Ernst-Museum he displayed paintings with such themes. By the late1920s it became the dominating topic on his paintings. Peasants, farm hands and harvesters of his native country appeared on the canvas. However, he had loved low-lying horizon and broad perspective landscapes with velvety, oil-green colors, by the1930s that calm harmony of shades became more and more colorful and unsettled.
The portrait of a ploughman, which is presumably identical with the composition “Evening work” exhibited in 1917, was also painted in Nyergesujfalu. The Cathedral of Esztergom, which is in approximately 16 km distance, can perfectly be seen in the Danube Bend. The hills in the background are still shining in the evening glow, while the figure of the ploughman is merging into mother earth.
In this very painting Kernstok was able to delineate the colorful dusk, the landscape of the Danube, the holy scene of Esztergom, which embraces the ploughman’s figure and his hard work with the aura of.

Bellák Gábor