Budapest 1883 – 1976 Szentendre
Czóbel received his artistic training in Hungary and moved to Paris in 1904. While working in Paris, he immersed himself in the flourishing colony of artists, which included Picasso, Braque, Léger and Matisse. In 1906, Czóbel participated in the Fauve Salon, which included Matisse, André Derain and Raoul Dufy, he being the only non-French artist of the group.
Czóbel’s first exhibition was in early 1908 at the Galerie Berthe Weill in Paris. Weill had shown Picasso in 1901 and presented Matisse’s first exhibit in late 1907. Over these same early years, Czóbel also was the leading artist of The Eight, Hungary’s remarkable group of early twentieth-century avant-garde artists.
In 1919-1926, Czóbel lived and exhibited in Berlin, together with German Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. From 1926 on, Czóbel divided his time between Szentendre (on the Danube, near Budapest), where there is now the Czóbel Museum, and his Paris studio in Montparnasse. In Paris, Czóbel was associated with a group of Eastern European artists, including Marc Chagall and Chaïm Soutine. In the 1960s and afterwards, Czóbel had two major dealers: the late Vladmir Raykis’s Galerie Zak in Paris and R. S. Johnson Fine Art in Chicago.