1893-1963

Theme/Style – Modernism, Byzantine subjects, religious subjects

Media – Oils, watercolors, inlaid panels, ceramic and wood sculptures

Artistic Focus – Karoly Fulop’s early paintings and batiks melded medieval influences with the Symbolist and Impressionist focus of early 20th Century Viennese painting, as well as the Art Deco aesthetic of the time. His later sculptural work often depicted religious processions, rituals and practices, and reflected the emerging trend toward polychromatic sculpture – with his creations of groupings of figures with colored glazes on ceramic, as well as wood sculptures featuring gold leaf, ivory inlays and colored pigments.

Career Highlights –

• Fulop studied art in Budapest, Munich and Paris before immigrating to New York around 1920.
• He first worked as a painter, depicting the docks of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he vacationed. Fulop also created decorative paintings and batiks with religious themes during his early years in America.
• By 1927, Fulop had established a residence in Los Angeles, where he opened a school of Decorative Arts.
• Fulop’s creative attention had turned to sculpture by the 1930s, and he began modeling in ceramics and carving wood and ivory figures in the round and in low relief. Melding images both old and new, the sculptures of Karoly Fulop echo the artist's upbringing as a student in a monastery school in Hungary, where he was surrounded by medieval art, as well as an adulthood lived among Modernist artists in Los Angeles.

Bibliographic references are available upon request.

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