(Ráckeve, 1886 – Budapest, 1971)
From 1919 Mária Modok studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, then in 1923 she enrolled at the Free School of Fine Arts in Nagybánya. Between 1937 and 1939 she attended private art schools in Paris. At the beginning of her career she created lyrical landscape paintings related to Nagybánya, while in the 1930s she painted socially charged figurative portraits of working women and their children.
Modok met Béla Czóbel in 1936 and they married in 1940. As a wife she did not regard painting as a priority anymore: she worked only when her husband did not need her. She painted her small pictures on remnant pieces of canvas and card, and then hid them.
Despite working in the shadow of Czóbel she was able to renew her pictorial style. On their trips to Paris she recognized the values of contemporary non-figurative painting: her lyrical, abstract land- and cityscapes are considered to be ground-breaking masterpieces in the history of Hungarian painting.