The students and staff of the Bauhaus included a number of Hungarian exiles, including Sándor Bortnyik and László Moholy-Nagy. As supporters of the short-lived Communist government of 1919, they had been forced out of Hungary by the counter-revolutionary White Terror.

Bortnyik came to Weimar after an active interlude in Berlin, where he had taken up a hard-line Communist position and worked with various Modernist architects in devising a new world for the proletariat. He rejected the utopian idealism of his fellow-countryman Lajos Kassák, whose periodical ‘Ma’ was the most influential mouthpiece of the Hungarian avant-garde in exile.

This painting has been interpreted as a satire on the metaphysically oriented Modernists aligned with Kassák. The ‘new man’ that it portrays is merely a fashionable dummy, incapable of independent action. In contrast, another portrait that Bortnyik painted in the same year shows the Hungarian architect Fréd Forbát and his wife. Forbát worked in Walter Gropius’s office, making an important contribution to the development of standardised building units. In Bortnyik’s painting, he is dressed austerely in a lab coat, the polar opposite of the dandy.

The hovering planar arrangement behind the ‘New Adam’ quotes a painting by El Lissitzky, Proun 1C of 1919. Critics have claimed that this is a negative comment on El Lissitzky, that the ‘pictorial architecture’ is condemned by idealism to float aimlessly without any practical purpose. Conversely, it may be a challenge that this absurd ‘New Adam’ is unable to see.