Rating and value of paintings by Vilmos Huszar

If you own a work by or based on the artist Vilmos Huszar and would like to know its value, our state-approved experts and auctioneers will guide you.

Our specialists will carry out a free appraisal of your work, and provide you with a precise estimate of its value on the current market. 

Then, if you wish to sell your work, we will direct you to the best possible arrangement to obtain the optimum price.  

Artist's rating and value

Hungarian abstract painter Vilmos Huszar, who is fairly well known in Europe, achieved great fame during his lifetime. Today, his works are highly prized on the market, particularly by collectors of his school. 

The artist therefore maintains a stable and lively quotation, with his creations being sold for between €30 and €162,900 on the auction market. 

A work by Huszar can sell for more than a hundred thousand euros, as demonstrated by his oil on canvas Abstract composition, dating from 1918, sold for €162,900 in 2017, whereas it was estimated at between €8,600 and €12,900. 

Order of value from the most basic to the most prestigious

The artist's works and style

In Vilmos Huszár's painting, structure retains this function of field organization, form distribution, rhythmic stability.

But it no longer relies on figuration or anecdote: it's based on geometric modules, clean flat tints, bold lines, arranged according to a logic of visual tension.

Color, pure, unadulterated, laid down without modeling, becomes an active element of composition, articulating planes, introducing movement. Drawing disappears, replaced by a system of axes and internal relationships that guide the eye without lingering.

In his neoplastic paintings, influenced by De Stijl, the surface is no longer the site of representation, but of construction. No detail, no depth, no texture: everything is reduced to simple forms, to calculated balances.

This formal reduction is found in Composition (fig. 1), where the black grid, the colored rectangles, the whites left empty compose a field without hierarchy, without center, without subject. The gaze circulates horizontally and vertically, never stopped, never focused.

Color - red, blue, yellow - doesn't express an emotion, it establishes a presence, defines a position in space. Each element exists through its relationship to the others, in a strict system, where the entire surface is activated.

The plane becomes autonomous, it supports nothing, it frames nothing: it is the very object of the painting. Withdrawn from both narrative and illusion, Vilmos Huszár's technique affirms a painting without depth or figure, founded on the equality of forms, on organized abstraction, on construction as finality.

The life of Vilmos Huszar

Vilmos Huszar (1884 - 1960) was a Hungarian artist born in Budapest, who was linked to the De Stijl movement for part of his career.

He trained at the Budapest School of Applied Arts, and at the Hollosy studio in Munich. In 1905, he left Hungary for the Netherlands, where he produced his first paintings, which were strongly influenced by the realist movement and the work of Van Gogh.

Huszar then tested Nabi painting (cf Ker-Xavier Roussel or Maurice Denis for his preprésentants in France). In the early 1910s, he worked mainly for Dutch high society, for whom he produced portraits, as well as a number of stained-glass windows. Under the influence of the Parisian avant-gardes, the shades of color he used in his works became simpler.

In 1917, he met Bart van der Leck, who introduced him to Neoplasticism. He then worked with colored surfaces as well as two-dimensional space, and geometric shapes arranged vertically and horizontally.

Huszar thus participated in the founding of the De Stijl movement, along with Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. This movement combines sculpture, design and painting, and consists of reducing compositions to primary colors (+ black and white) and vertical and horizontal lines.

The artist thus founded the magazine De Stijl, with van Doesburg. He designed the issue's first cover. He went on to do a great deal of graphic work, typography and advertising illustration, and was commissioned to do so.

However, this movement only suited him for a short time, as he left it in 1923 - in order to produce more figurative paintings once again. Remaining in the Netherlands, he worked after De Stijl in Hierden, where he worked in industrial and commercial graphics.

He then returned to landscape paintings and the search for a pure, non-objective language.

Focus on Composition en rouge, bleu et jaune, Georges Vantongerloo

In Composition en rouge, bleu et jaune (fig. 1), the surface retains this property of measured balance, visual clarity, restrained tension. But it is no longer based on frontal symmetry or an asserted center: it is constructed by internal relationships, by displacements, by interruptions.

Black lines, straightforward, vertical and horizontal, do not delimit a space; they give it rhythm, fragment it, impose an order. Solid colors - red, blue, yellow - don't fill: they occupy, they balance, they punctuate. White is not a void: it is an active zone, a breathing field, a counterpoint.

There is no figure, no background, no depth. Every element is equivalent, every form stable, every color laid down without variation. The eye circulates without stopping, gliding from one edge to the other, according to a logic of sliding and equivalence.

The composition seeks neither to seduce nor to express: it exposes a structure, it maintains a balance. Thus, removed from any external reference, the image asserts itself as an autonomous object, without narrative, without center, without outside. A painting of position, not representation.

Vilmos Huzsàr's imprint on his period

In Vilmos Huszár's work, composition retains this function of rational construction, of ordering forms, of visual stability. But it is no longer based on subject or figuration: it is articulated around a geometric system, strict relationships between lines, colors and surfaces.

Within the De Stijl movement, of which he was a founder, Huszár developed a painting without anecdote, without motif, without hierarchy. Each element is reduced to its function: the line organizes, the color balances, the plane activates. The image is no longer a place of representation, it becomes a field of pure relationships.

This conception goes beyond the frame of the painting. It applies to graphic space, to the object, to architecture, according to a logic of plastic unification.

Huszár's influence, though more discreet than that of Mondrian or Van Doesburg, is part of the same refusal of subjectivity, in the same search for a universal language.

Thus, removed from both individual expression and the illusionist tradition, his imprint on his period is exerted in rigor, formal coherence, clarity of structure - a painting thought of as construction, without narrative, without center, without outside.

The success of Vilmos Huszar's works at auction

In the art market, Vilmos Huszár's work retains this value of formal rigor, plastic clarity, historical inscription in the avant-gardes.

But it is not distinguished by the rarity of an isolated gesture: it stands out by its participation in a whole, by its role in the formation of the De Stijl language, by the precision of its implementation.

At auction, his works - paintings, drawings, graphic models - meet with sustained interest, driven by the gradual recognition of his place in the neo-plastic movement. Pieces dating from the years 1917-1925, when they appear on the market, achieve solid results, often reinforced by the rarity of his major compositions.

Collectors, attentive to the history of geometric abstraction, are looking for works both inscribed in the De Stijl system and marked by Huszár's own flexibility: a freer use of the curve, attention to rhythm, sensitivity to the medium.

Preparatory drawings, printed studies or posters are also sought after, as evidence of his interdisciplinary work.

So, removed from spectacular speculation but buoyed by the solidity of his formal heritage, Huszár's success at auction rests on the legibility of his work, its place in the history of modernism, and the constancy of his plastic demands.

His signature

Not all of Vilmos Huszàr's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of his signature:

Expertise your property

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