 Béla Czóbel was born to a Jewish-Hungarian family in Budapest in 1883.He became a student of Béla Iványi-Grünwald in the Nagybánya free school, held in an artists' colony in what is now Baia Mare, Romania.In 1902, he went to Munich to study, where he became friends with Jules Pascin, Rudolph Levy and Walter Bondy.