Adalbert Erdeli

He studied at the Budapest Academy of Arts from 1911 through 1915, then taught in Mukachevo and Uzhhorod, when Transcarpathia already became part of Czechoslovakia.

[2] Along with fellow Budapest graduate and World War I veteran József Boksai, Erdelyi founded an art school in 1927, which eventually evolved into the Uzhhorod State Arts and Crafts College (Czech: Užhorodské státní vysoké školy uměleckoprůmyslové, Hungarian: Kárpátaljai Képzőművészek Egyesülete).

Between 1911 and 1915 he graduated from the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, where his masters were Károly Ferenczy, Imre Révész and Tivadar Zemplényi.

[3] After Hungary lost the war, he concealed his Hungarian identity and registered as a Ukrainian to avoid forced labour ("málenkij robot"), deportation and potential death at the Szolyva extermination camp.

The leaders of the puppet state supported his initiative to start the Uzhhorod College of Fine Arts in 1945.

He was rector of the short-lived institution, director of the Uzhhorod School of Applied Arts from 1946 to 1949 and teacher from 1949 to 1955.

He was one of the founders of the Transcarpathian branch of the Ukrainian Association of Fine Arts, and was its organiser and first president from 1946 to 1949.

At first he believed in the Soviet power that favoured art, but later he was disappointed to learn that the ideologists of the party state in Transcarpathia rejected the artistic direction he represented.

On the 'black day' of Transcarpathian culture, on 21 March 1949, at a meeting of intellectuals held in the county council hall, organised on the orders of the Party against Erdélyi and his fellow cosmopolitans, according to László Balla's contemporary records Erdélyi was given the coup de grace.

The keynote speaker, prepared by the county party committee, Ukrainian poet Yuriy Hojda, head of the Transcarpathian Writers' Union, accused Erdélyi in the 23 March 1949 issue of the newspaper Sovietskoye Zakarpaty: "that with his formalistic canvases and bourgeois aestheticism he tried to smuggle rotten Western culture into the land of Transcarpathia" calling him and the other expellees: "landless vagrants without identity cards" and stating: "This rabble of aestheticizing anti-patriotic slanderers must be crushed in the fullest possible way."

He was able to get out of his difficult financial situation by taking on commissions with the Fine Arts Construction Company, and doing heavy industrial work.

Fearful of being completely crushed, he is self-critical in the press, trying to assert his "Soviet patriotism" in various forums.

His biographer, László Balla, draws attention to this: "... diaries also prove the master's excellent writing skills.

Perhaps I will seek in the great garbage heap of the earth the seeds of peace, understanding and love of all men towards one another."

Sensing his impending death, he writes the final lines of his diary: "I finished these thoughts after the birth of Christ in June 1954" But before that, he writes in the booklet: "Look around you and after your daily death, you will rise every morning into eternal beauty and your soul will be one with the one who created you and you will carry within you the pure humanity of the true man and you will feel that you carry within you God, the universe and the divine wonders of existence."

Immediately before the artist's death, the local ideologists of the party showed leniency towards Béla Erdélyi, who was striving for compromise.

According to his nephew László Erdélyi, a painter from Ungvár: "Because of his European education and openness to the world, he was considered cosmopolitan, his art decadent and formal.

The statement of László Erdélyi (his nephew, who is close to his family) is correct: "His father was a Rusyn teacher in the village of Hátmeg in the Ilosva district, his mother was German.

The first album dedicated to his work was published in 1972 (Pavlov, V.: Erdelyi Album (in Cyrillic), Kiev, 1972).All of them emphasize that Béla Erdélyi's great organizational skills created a flourishing artistic life, that without his highly influential art, the distinctively individual stylistic tendency that is now called the Transcarpathian school could hardly have developed.

In his paintings, drama, abstract forms, light reflections and bright but harmonious colours play an important role.

From 1945 he participated in the Ukrainian and Soviet art federation exhibitions (Uzhhorod, Mukachevo, Kiev, Moscow).