Having adopted a style which echoed Expressionism, he influenced Romanian art mainly as a pedagogue: among the critically acclaimed contemporary painters to have been inspired by his views is Ștefan Câlția.
Literary critics Cornel Ungureanu and Paul Cernat note that the links created between Ma and the Bucharest-based magazine Contimporanul, centered on the friendship between their two editors, Kassák and Ion Vinea, may also have involved a loose group of supporters from Timișoara.
Alongside Podlipny, they were ethnic Romanian politico Aurel Buteanu and German poet and anarchist activist Robert Reiter, together with the Hungarian writers Rodion Markovits and Károly Endre.
[6] At the time, Podlipny's art was a sample of Romanian Expressionism, focusing especially on depicting images of suffering, marginality and despair, including portraits of physically disabled people, or landscapes seemingly painted in absolute solitude.
[1] Writing in 1931, critic G. Stoienescu sampled two of Podlipny's characteristic subjects: a group of "crippled pilgrims", "obsessed by a vision", huddled in front of their "tin Christ"; and "a traveller and his gentle beasts of burden", going about their business inside "an unreal world.
A visitor of his 1946 exhibit noted: "With his only arm, the left one, Iuliu Podlipny has produced haunting graphics, where shadows fraternise with the light, and destiny with man and with God.
[3] Adrian Maniu, the Expressionist poet and art chronicler, included Podlipny to the great painters under "accursed spells", as one who moved freely between "genius and insanity".
[4] Ștefan Câlția credits Podlipny and Corneliu Baba with having instilled in him a "respect for school" that replaced his initial "rather nonconformist" approach to art training.
"[13] Constantin Flondor, who was Podlipny's student between 1950 and 1954, remembers being influenced by his "simple, clear and unshakable" pronouncements on artistic matters, such as: "Art requires an abandonment, a self-sacrifice.
Taking your place in front of a sheet or a canvass which promises the meeting between a piece of vine charcoal or a brush and the white surface is a moment charged with the thrills of genesis.
"[4] Ciocârlie, who describes Podlipny as "one-armed, nervous, intransigent, sarcastic", recounts the artist's contempt for painting as opposed to drawing and graphics: "to him, colorists were a finical bunch lacking in energy, incapable of tracing a single line.