Budapest 1911 – 1994 Sopron
Hungarian Painter
Wild Boars in Winter Forest
Value: up to 5.000€
Szobota Istvan was born in 1911 in Budapest, Hungary. He was self-taught Hungarian painter, graphic artist and caricaturist.
After high school he went for a year to Paris to study and he spent a few months in Tunis.
He was then called up as a soldier. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was sent to the Russian front. When his unit was destroyed, he went back to Hungary.
In 1943 he settled in Cluj-Napoca and painted, trying to sell his paintings in the countryside.
In 1949, when the Romanian state was sorting out the citizenship status, he was asked to take Romanian citizenship, but as he refused, he was taken away one night. His family received a letter from him three months later, when he was already in Pest. He described how he had been taken to the Romanian-Hungarian border and simply pushed back to Hungary without any documents. He was caught and beaten for three days, because they thought he was a spy, and then released. His family was only able to follow him to Pest years later.
He moved to Zamárdi in 1956 and managed to build up a clientele in Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands.
Szobota Istvan died in 1994 in Sopron. He was a lonely artist, he did not belong to any clique or society, and wouldn’t want to connect with the Fine Arts organizations and the Communist system.
