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Bortnyik, Sándor
(b Marosvásárhely [now Tîrgu Mures, Romania], 3 July 1893; d Budapest, 3 Dec 1976). Hungarian painter, printmaker and poster designer. He was a leading figure in the avant-garde and a member of the group centred round the journal MA edited by Lajos Kassák. Bortnyik started his career as a poster designer; one of his first successes, the Unicum poster (1915; see 1986 exh. cat., p. 52), remained in print for decades. During 1918–19 his linocuts (e.g. Red Star, Lenin and Liebknecht) adorned the title page of MA. His paintings of that period, Red Locomotive (Budapest, N. Mus., Dept Mod. Hist.), Red Factory (Pécs, Pannonius Mus.) and Yellow-green Landscape (priv. col., see Borbély, 1971, illus. 10), show his attempts to achieve harmony and order through an increasingly abstract use of colour symbolism and form. Forced to emigrate when the Council Republic fell in 1919, he went to Vienna, then to Weimar; he also worked in Berlin and Kassa (now Kosice, Slovakia). In 1921, at the same time as Kassák, he began to produce abstract architectonic Constructivist works. Characteristic of the six-page Album is the rhythmical distribution of three or four colours and various geometrical figures, along with the occasional individual letter. During this period he also produced radically different pictures, such as the Cubo-Futurist Marchers, the heroic, idealist Smiths and the Lamplighter (all Budapest, N.G.). The latter shows Bortnyik’s move from colour symbolism to a concern with light, using the image of the worker as a Promethean bringer of light, the moon halo-like behind his head.
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