timeless-portrait-of-a-midcentury-student

The word "timeless" in an art context usually signals that the work aspires to transcend the period it was made in. But Czimber's student portraits don't transcend their moment so much as preserve it precisely: the specific self-consciousness of being young in postwar Hungary, the particular texture of an education undertaken in a world that had recently changed in ways no curriculum prepared anyone for. Whether the portrait is timeless depends on whether what it captures is — and the quality of the look here suggests it is.