Riders Károly Kernstok

Károly Kernstok, the leading figure of The Eight, was mostly concerned with the legacy of Renaissance and Mannerism, compositions depicting nudes in a landscape, and updated the scenery of Arcadia into the ideal image of a future harmonious society.
In many respects, the drawing from 1912 is more harmonious than his first painting with a similar title, in which the loosely painted landscape is strongly separated from the figures depicted with outlines and reduced colours on the large canvass. Its group of figures standing in the centre is not in harmony with the mass of riders scattered rather randomly, while representations in the flat and in space alternate. On the ink drawing, however, everything is seen from above, the landscape sprawling in a flat expanse is rendered with fine sculptural features. In the thus divided composition, the figures rendered in characteristic profile, featuring various phases of movement, are presented in a carefully balanced way. Kernstok preserves the harmonious unity of flatness, while still managing to sneaks in the expansive space of the landscape into the composition with a kind of relief-like effect.