Lajos Vajda, Hungarian painter and illustrator (d. 1941)
Lajos Vajda (Hungarian: Vajda Lajos; 1908, Zalaegerszeg – 1941, Budakeszi) was a Hungarian painter and graphic artist. From 1927 to 1930 he was a student of István Csók at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
Vajda stayed in Paris between 1930 and 1934 and, in addition to the most recent trends in French painting, he also got acquainted with the outstanding works of the Russian Realist film. This prompted him to create his dramatic photo-montages of the great cataclysms of mankind, war, hunger, armed violence and abject misery. From 1934 onwards, he collected folk art motifs in Szentendre and Szigetmonostor. In his style, folk art and Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic and Jewish symbols were combined with abstract and surrealistic elements. His last abstract surrealistic drawings foreshadow the horrors of World War II. He died of tuberculosis in 1941.
"Over a ten-year period, Vajda created an impressive oeuvre, the formal and content-related preoccupations of which were rooted in Constructivism and Surrealism. (...) His independence from the dogmas of these two movements, his great inventiveness and his use of local historical materials helped define the Hungarian avantgarde."