Pártos, born Julius Puntzmann at Apatin, trained under Antal Szkalnitzky in Pest and took an architecture degree in Berlin in 1870, then formed a Budapest partnership with Ödön Lechner that lasted a quarter-century. Their own account of the division of labour has Lechner leading the artistic side and Pártos running the practice's organisational side, though the buildings they produced — culminating in the Museum of Applied Arts, opened for the Hungarian millennial celebrations of 1896 — carry both their names jointly in the record. The partnership dissolved that year. Pártos then worked independently for sixteen years, mostly on churches, chapels and municipal buildings across Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia, in a manner closer to conventional historicism than to the Hungarian Art Nouveau he had helped Lechner build.
