tapestry-of-townsfolk-portrait-framed-canvas

Czimber arranges his subjects the way a weaver arranges threads — each figure contributing something the others don't, the pattern only becoming visible when you see all of them together. Hungarian street life in the mid-twentieth century is the raw material, but the structure is the painting's real subject. Who stands near whom, whose face turns which direction, what the collective composition says that no individual element says alone. Individual portraits, built into a collective one.