Gyorgy Roman at Janos Gat - New York

Handicapped by deafness--a consequence of suffering meningitis at the age of two--and a survivor of fascism, the painter Gyorgy Roman (1903-1981) became one of Hungary's most important 20th-century artists. Roman was more or less an autodidact, despite having trained on and off at several schools, including the Hungarian National Academy of Fine Arts.

Despite economic hardship, he lived a romantic life. He worked, with some success, as a professional boxer, entering tournament fights in Vienna and Berlin, and in the 1930s he spent considerable time in Shanghai, where he set up a candy manufacturing business. Unfortunately, his products were eaten up by rats, an animal prominently featured in a number of his paintings. Given his Jewish background, Roman had to flee Budapest during World War II, but he returned in January 1945.

Roman's painting style is almost naive. Sometimes he personalizes a depiction of struggle. In A Fight with Myself (1978), a man in dark-brown clothing prepares to hit another man with the same face and clothed in identical garments, in a field of yellow flowers. The man about to be struck wears a wry smile, as though acknowledging the absurdity of his position.

Inevitably, Roman's art proves allegorical, and this happens not because we know the events in his life but because he himself saw his art this way. The powerful 1929 painting Tooth Extraction in 1820 presents a pointed scene: a dentist is about to pull a tooth of a man with a bare torso. It is only after we have looked more closely that we realize that the dentist himself is naked from the waist down. What might be a routine procedure is portrayed as both brutal and sexual. According to the artist's autobiography, it is an allegory of fascism. He painted it in Berlin; Hungary had been fascist since 1919. In the dark oil Rats (1972), the rodents swarm in a mass around the corner of a windowless red-brick building, perhaps a factory. It is not hard to imagine the painting as a condemnation of the Soviet version of socialism that followed fascism in Hungary. There is a rawness in all Roman's art that speaks to an ethical and social awareness that sets him apart. And indeed, Roman remained a lifelong independent.

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