1859 -1945 · Sátoraljaújhely, Vienne, Paris and Kecskemét

Hungarian painter and illustrator, Imre Révész combines academic training, Munkácsy's lesson and attention to the peasant world in a social realism carried by Panem!

Imre Révész, born Csebrai, was born in 1859 in Sátoraljaújhely, Hungary. He studied in Vienna then continued his training in Paris, where he worked in Mihály Munkácsy's entourage. This proximity to the great Hungarian painter reinforces his taste for narrative painting based on dark values, material and the observation of popular circles. Révész practices portraiture, the peasant scene, illustration and history painting. His career received international recognition when a bronze medal was awarded to him at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889. The work Panem!, dated 1899, remained his most famous image. His Latin title means "Bread! . Composition does not reduce rural poverty to a picturesque setting: group, gestures, expectations and relationships of views concentrate the material question of subsistence. The large scale gives this daily demand a gravity close to history painting. Révész taught from 1904 at the Hungarian Higher School of Fine Arts. He also worked in Nagybânya, an important outdoor center for the renewal of Hungarian painting. After the First World War, he played a lasting role in Kecskemét: he reorganized and then directed the artists' colony during the 1920s and early 1930s. His teaching linked the discipline of drawing and observation direct and pay attention to the realities of the Great Plain. He then retired to Nagysz ʼl·s, today Vynohradiv in Ukraine, where he died in 1945. Between academicism and critical realism, his work gave rural workers a monumental presence without erasing their living conditions. The "Imre Révész" selection notably compares Panem!. His reading favors light.

At Révész, the peasant scene takes on the scale of history painting: an immediate need becomes a collective and political question.