With Woman with Four Men, Miklós Németh drives Neo-Expressionism to its peak: raw, provocative, unvarnished. The scene is frontal and plainspoken—a female nude surrounded by four male figures whose bodies and gestures flow into one another in intense, at times sharply contrasting colours. The planar, impasto manner of painting heightens the impression of immediate, almost aggressive expressivity.
Németh forgoes idealisation and decorative restraint—bodily presence and emotional directness are in charge here. Deliberately rough linework, the visible trace of the brush, and the renunciation of anatomically accurate detail shift the focus to an affect-laden presence. The painting does not seek appeasement; it forces a bodily, immediate gaze.
In the Fauvist spirit, colour organises the scene and regulates affect: cool blues, turquoises, pinks, and yellows in the male figures draw the eye to the central female figure. The pronounced flatness—clear contours instead of depth modelling—reinforces this guidance: colour shapes form and keeps the space deliberately flat. The result is a vibrating dramaturgy in which intimacy, desire, and power collide directly.
The work’s expressivity can be compared with Maria Lassnig’s Mit einem Tiger schlafen (1975). In both Németh and Lassnig, the body becomes the site of inner states—tense desire in Németh; an ambivalent coexistence of closeness and threat in Lassnig. In Lassnig, the brushstroke remains controlled, transitions are soft, values finely modulated; Németh prefers impasto placements, abrupt edges, visible corrections—the working process remains perceptible as gestural energy in the painting.
Lassnig aims at body awareness—an introspective self-image between tenderness and danger. By contrast, Németh—in the mode of a male-coded fantasy—shifts the emphasis assertively into the public sphere; multiple figures, sexual symbolism, and performative brushwork condense into a scene of desire and hierarchy.
Between figurative Expressionism, Fauvist colour dramaturgy, and raw figuration, Woman with Four Men asserts a presence of the body that is less depiction than event. Thus emerges a pictorial language that is deliberately unpolished, physical, direct—a work that refuses to placate and challenges the gaze. Woman with Four Men stands for artistic freedom at the boundary between eroticism, provocation, and uncompromising painting.
