Hungarian-born painter, naturalised French, born on 18 November 1913 in Mohács (Hungary), died in September 1999 in Paris.
Life
Endre Rozsda trained at the independent school of the painter Vilmos Aba-Novák. His first solo exhibition, at the Tamás gallery in Budapest in 1936, attracted notice: the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest bought a canvas from him. Yet a concert by Béla Bartók led him to question his Post-Impressionist manner.
In 1938 he settled in Paris with the sculptor Lajos Barta and attended classes at the École du Louvre. He discovered Surrealism and became friends with Árpád Szenes, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Françoise Gilot, Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti. The German occupation forced him to return to Budapest in 1943. After the war he was among the founders of the European School, a group dissolved in 1948 under the Communist regime; from then on he could only paint in secret, without exhibiting.
After the crushing of the 1956 revolution he returned to France for good. In 1957 Simone Collinet’s gallery on place de Furstenberg gave him an exhibition whose catalogue was prefaced by André Breton. In 1961 he took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition organised by Breton at the Galleria Schwarz in Milan, and in 1964 he received the Copley Prize, awarded by a jury that included Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Naturalised French in 1970, in 1979 he set up his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he worked until his death. He is buried in the Montmartre cemetery.
The work
Rozsda’s painting feeds on time and memory, as he himself wrote:
“From my memories and from light I weave a dense fabric, and I gaze at it until it comes alive, returns my gaze and rises up before me. It is time that I want to seize, to order, to weigh. Time, the many-coloured and luminous oblivion; out of pleasures and sufferings, time makes its pearls. Around them I braid the ivy of my memories. I do not want to judge or to explain, but to understand. I lay my head on time and listen to what it tells me.” (Endre Rozsda)
Among the works shown at the gallery: Valamint (1947, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm), Le Château de Barbe Bleue (1965-1979, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm), Trompé par la brume (1977, oil on cardboard), Le Jardin de l’au-delà (1983, oil on canvas, 16 x 24 cm).
Exhibitions and collections
- Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest (purchase in 1936).
- Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon: Amour sacré, amour profane (1947).
- Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou: Promenade d’Erzsébet (1946), selected in 2025 to enter the national collections.
- Hungarian Museum of Photography: bequest of his photographs and negatives.
- Retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, June to November 2027.