Schaár Erzsébet ifjúkora és korai szobrászművészete (1908-1931)

The present paper is a subchapter of my doctoral dissertation titled The Oeuvre of Sculptor Erzsébet Schaár (1908– 1975). The paper discussing a period of her life’s path sofar only tangentially touched on by special literature divides into three parts: the first is concerned with the artist’s family background, childhood and adolescence, the second with the initial phase of the career, the academy years, and the third looks at works created in the 1920s and the early 1930s, as well as exhibitions of that period. Schaár was a veritable “child prodigy”. She began her studies as Zsigmond Kisfaludi Stróbl’s private pupil at the age of sixteen and a year later, in 1925 she was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art where her tutor was again Kisfaludi Stróbl. She debuted with her works publicly in 1926, first of all in exhibitions of the Szinyei Society and the KÚT (=new society of artists). Though several of her that-time works got lost or are latent, an approximately authentic overview of her art in that period can be had from exhibition catalogues, receptions, materials in archives and private collections – first of all the Vilt estate in the King St Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár and the mostly unprocessed written and photography documents, correspondence in the Schaár estate, as well as from recollections by her contemporaries, first of all Tibor Vilt. A few nudes are known from this period, but her early artistic activity centred on portrait sculpture. This is also the clew along which the phases Schar’s artistic development, the modifications of her style, the influences exerted on her can be demonstrated from the earliest known portraits of her mother to the series of children’s portraits in the late 1920s, early 1930s. The studied period is characterized by a search of her own idiosyncratic style: in the 1920s she created both realistic portraits and works displaying features of art deco and cubism, she was interested in modelling with simple forms, experimented with facial casts – a procedure that returned in later phases of the oeuvre. In sum, the earliest period of Schaár’s sculptural activity displays such singularly powerful idea of plasticity and creative outlook that compare with the later phases of the oeuvre in talent and quality, but with the help of which posterity can discern the trends that were to unfold in full later. Studying this early period may contribute to a more profound understanding and comprehensive interpretation of the entire oeuvre.