MIKLOS SUBA (1880-1944)
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Biography • Miklos Suba (1880-1944)
In 1924, Miklos Suba immigrated to the United States from Hungary, settling in Brooklyn. The energy and prosperity of his new home had a profound impact on the artist, who had left behind a country made politically and financially unstable by the First World War. As a result, Suba’s work shifted from pastoral Hungarian landscapes to hard-edged industrial scenes.
As a young man Suba studied architecture at the Hungarian Technical University of Budapest, training he used in Hungary and the United States as a draftsman and designer. It is likely that this training predisposed him to the Precisionist esthetic, characterized by sharply delineated, simplified images and marked by meticulous brushwork. Like other associated with this movement, such as Ralston Crawford, Charles Demuth, or Charles Sheeler, Suba gravitated toward the industrial subjects that fueled Precisionism. Suba is unique among his Precisionist colleagues in his focus on Brooklyn subjects. Difficulty with the English language and limited finances might have narrowed his geographical focus, but did not prevent him from grappling with the same Modernist issues as his avant-garde peers.
Between 1926 and 1944 Miklos Suba’s work was shown in twenty-one exhibitions in a variety of venues: The Anderson Galleries, Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Artist's Gallery in Brooklyn, The Grant Studios in Brooklyn, Delphic Studios in New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. He was included in two important shows, American Realists and Magic Realists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1944 and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1943 annual. The Downtown Gallery held a memorial exhibition for the artist in 1945.
Suba’s paintings from the 1930s and 1940s focus on two distinct aspects of Brooklyn: the clean lines of its industrial warehouses and brownstones, and the numerous references he found there to American folk culture.
Selected Exhibitions:
Anderson Galleries Spring Salon in 1926; Brooklyn Museum of Art Group Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings by American and Foreign Artists in 1931; Artists' Galleries Open Exhibition of Paintings given by the Brooklyn Painters and Sculptors for Brooklyn and Long Island Artists 1931; Grant Studio Exhibition by the Brooklyn Society of Modern Artists and Guest Exhibitors in 1936; Delphic Studios Exhibition by the Brooklyn Painters and Sculptors in 1938; National Academy of Design 117th Annual Exhibition in 1943; the Art Institute of Chicago Drawings by Miklos Suba in 1945; Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1967, 1972 and 1973; Everson Museum of Art Miklos Suba in 1974; Hirschl & Adler Galleries in 1980, 1983, 1986 and 1995.