Vajda stayed in Paris between 1930 and 1934 and, in addition to the most recent trends in French painting, he also got acquainted with the outstanding works of the Russian Realist film.

This prompted him to create his dramatic photo-montages of the great cataclysms of mankind, war, hunger, armed violence and abject misery.

In his style, folk art and Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic and Jewish symbols were combined with abstract and surrealistic elements.

"Over a ten-year period, Vajda created an impressive oeuvre, the formal and content-related preoccupations of which were rooted in Constructivism and Surrealism.

(...) His independence from the dogmas of these two movements, his great inventiveness and his use of local historical materials helped define the Hungarian avantgarde.

The photomontages made in Paris, and later the stream of many-layered drawing montages, collages and simultaneous compositions illustrate his artistic convictions: the problems of painting can be solved through ideas coming from the world of film.

[21] In Vajda’s photomontages “the extreme forces of the human world appear in a dramatic simultaneity: dead babies and decrepit old men, knife and bread, rifle and bird, tiger and lily: the jungle laws of the struggle for survival and pure flowers are composed into one picture in diagonals of tension.

The first one is the simultaneous inclusion of all possible viewpoints of the topic, the second one is that the planes that form the background of the picture tend to be involuntarily lengthened in the imagination.

In addition to windows, house facades, gravestones, gate piers, he drew a kerosene lamp, a peasant's cart or a table with a knife, an apple and a loaf of bread on it.

"[26]The "constructive-surrealist sematics" quoted from the letter suggests that "Vajda really 'assembles' his motifs, stretching them onto the plane of the picture or creating an organic system out of them.

On 11 August 1936, Vajda wrote to Júlia Richter, mentioning his best friend at the time, Dezső Korniss: "Let us examine two persons.

(...) Our aspirations are to develop a new art specific to East-Central Europe, relying on the French and Russian influences of the two great European cultural centres.

[28] Through a series of self-portrait icons, Lajos Vajda attempts to reconcile the individual and the communal forces, and the worldly and transcendent spheres.

(...) In the portrait that emerged from the interpenetration of human and divine imagery, Vajda presented his 'true', definitive self-portrait of himself, the face of the artist who, through the power of art, could enter into a relationship with God, with the transcendent world beyond the tangible.

On the one hand, there is the personal fate of Vajda himself: his increasingly hopeless struggle with his illness, with the shadow of an unwanted and feared death.

On the other hand, there is the reality of the world war, which in the eyes of Vajda (and of many other European artists) becomes the tragedy of a civilisation that is based on humanist values and cultural traditions.