Zsófia Dénes

Zsófia Dénes was a Hungarian writer, journalist, and art critic who advocated for modern art movements in Hungary and promoted Hungarian modernism abroad. Dénes became a critic of modern art in the early 1910s while living in Paris, where she worked as a cultural correspondent for Hungarian magazines. In addition to her numerous pieces of art criticism, interviews, and artist profiles, Dénes also actively translated key texts of French modernism to Hungarian.

Born into a wealthy family of French and German heritage, Dénes learned several languages as a child living in Budapest. At home she spoke Hungarian and French, and she also attended German, English, and Italian classes. Dénes was exceptional in her generation of upper-class women in attending higher education: she enrolled in the Scientific University of Budapest, where she took seminars in art history and literature. She first visited Paris in 1911 upon the invitation of her cousin, the Hungarian painter Valéria Dénes, who offered her Parisian apartment to Zsófia while traveling to Africa in the company of Henri Matisse and Sándor Galimberti. Zsófia Dénes joined her cousin’s social circles in Paris; the Hungarian Cubist painter Alfréd Réth, a participant in the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, became her primary guide to the Parisian art world.

Needing to support herself after the death of her first husband, Dénes started working as a journalist. From 1912 she became the Parisian correspondent of the Hungarian magazine Pesti Napló (Pest Diary), where she published biweekly reviews of major cultural events in Paris. Her artistic journalism was characterized by not only her enthusiasm for modern art but also her attention to female artists. Her long essay on the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, for instance, introduced Hungarian readers to the latest work of artists such as Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Marc Chagall, Vassily Kandinsky, Marie Laurencin, Stella Prottmann, and Maurice de Vlaminck.

Upon her return to Hungary in 1913, Dénes started writing for the leftist Hungarian magazine Világ (World), a publication dedicated to radical arts, science, and politics. During the First World War, she became increasingly involved with anti-war, socialist politics. In addition to volunteering as a social worker, she delivered lectures with socialist political messages. In 1916 Dénes gave a talk on the work of the French socialist writer Romain Rolland at the National Association of Women Officials in Budapest. During the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Bolshevik Republic, Dénes worked in the editorial office of the Communist daily Vörös Ujság (Red Newspaper), as well as authored a propaganda pamphlet on Marxist feminism, A nő a kommunista társadalomban (The Woman in Communist Society, 1919). Like many intellectuals who supported the Bolshevik party, Dénes went into exile upon the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary in summer 1919. She moved to Vienna and worked for the leftist Hungarian-language exile magazine Bécsi Magyar Újság (Viennese Hungarian Newspaper), where she published unique profiles about Hungarian exile artists such as Béla Uitz and Sándor Bortnyik.

Dénes also translated from French to Hungarian some of the foundational texts of Cubism, such as “Sur la peinture,” the opening essay of Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 Peintres Cubistes: Méditations Esthétiques(published in Hungarian in 1919), and Henri Le Fauconnier’s “La conception artistique d’aujourd’hui et la peinture” (Hungarian edition, 1913). During her exile in Vienna, she translated to Hungarian Jocaste, a novel by the French socialist writer Anatole France (Hungarian edition, 1921), as well as Blaise Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre, an anthology of African folk tales (Hungarian edition, 1924).

Dénes returned to Hungary in 1925 and remained there for the rest of her life.