“After the years of the Great War, after the time of the Fauve revolution,

after the era of Cubism, after the brief, epic days of Orphism, Paris witnessed the unfolding of the genius of Farkas: a painter, scholar of his art, solid in craftsmanship, and marvelously impermeable to surrealist splashes—capable of invention in the way affirmed fifteen years earlier by the poets congregating on Montmartre in the magnificent and sordid studio of Pablo Picasso, with whom Etienne Farkas has nothing in common except this Luciferian ability of formulating dreams through the most complete signs of reality.”

                                                                         —André Salmon, 1935

“Farkas, like Avery, seems to have been equally drawn to the flattened planes

of Synthetic Cubism and the broad expanses of heightened hues of Matisse; also suggested an interest in Braque's dense, generous manner of composing and his way of pulling lights and brights out of darks. What seems Farkas's own is a brushiness and delicacy verging on whispiness and the mood of wistful melancholy. An al fresco lunch party, painted in 1929 was at first glance sunny and robust with figures compressed into blocky planes brought close to the surface in a setting of sprintime greens embedded in a matrix of brushy blacks.

Longer viewing made the pastoral idyll seems unstable. About a decade later Farkas treated the theme even more somberly as a group of figures relaxing in

a rather bleak garden, a wide fetureless space separeted from even wider more featureless spaces by a fragile picket-fence with everything bathed in a rosy curiously gloomy light. The sense of impermanence and transience was heightened by Farkas's preferred medium of tempera on wood. His paint sits

up on the surface, making brushmarks into major events; the opaque tempera seems—oddly almost transparent so that materiality and thinness compete

for dominance.”

                                                 —Karen Wilkin, Partisan Review, 2000