French painter of Hungarian birth. At the age of 19 he left Hungary and spent a year in Italy, working on his own and studying Renaissance art. In 1905 he moved to Paris where he studied briefly at the Académie J.E. Blanche and discovered the work of Cézanne at the Galerie Vollard and Hindu art in the Parisian museums. He took part in the Cubist movement from around 1909 to 1914; a large one-man exhibition of his work was held at the Sturm-Galerie in Berlin in 1913. Obliged to spend the years during World War in Britany, Reth produced little further work until the early 1920s, when he started to make pictures of scenes of Parisian life. In the course of the 1930s most of his works became completely abstract, and in 1933 he joined the group Abstraction-Création. His abstract paintings tend to be rhythmical in composition and brightly coloured and frequently incorporate collage materials or areas of texture made with sand or cement.
