Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1982. január-június (36. évfolyam, 1-25. szám)
1982-02-18 / 7. szám
2. AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ Thursday, Feb. 18. 1982. Hungarian Art 1920-1970: A Review of the Northeastern Art Gallery Exhibit by Brian R. Kologe It is clear that Hungarian artists, whether on native soil or expatriated, vigorously pursued their vision and the vision of their time. Until recently, however, their, contribution to the _ modern tradition has been, as Profes- sor Serényi put it, “Hungary’s best kept secret.” In the period between the world wars, for example, an artist such as Béla Kádár would find the political . climate of Weimar Germany rqore conducive to creativity than that of his own nation. While Kádár did not really develop a technique any more radical than a sort of specimen cubism, such innovations were not welcome in a nation bent on maintaining a conservative, if not reactionary, cultural atmosphere. “Essentially,” explains Serenyi, “the country remained, in terms of its mentality and illusions, a monarchy. After World War I there was a nostalgic state of mind looking back to the ‘grand old days.’ Modern art was seen as a threat to a feudal order, and indeed, many of these artists had a tremendous contempt for that order.” In Kádár’s work, as well as that of Hugo Scheiber, one can relive the quiet thrill of artists discovering a revolutionary visual vocabulary. They began by analyzing the planes and angles of commonplace reality. By breaking images into facets and reassembling them, they could present the complexities of a prismatic café, for example, or an ordinary bowl of fruit, from several different perspectives simultaneously. To enhance these investigations they frequently employed a distinctively Hungarian palette, one derived from the colors of folk art. Later, Kádái; intoxicated with the pure grace and power of line and form liberated from subject matter, would break entirely into abstraction. In addition Hungarian artists found themselves fascinated by that exhilarating commotion we accept today as contemporary urban life. Like Joseph Stella’s painting of the light of Coney Island’s mechanical paradise, or Giacomo Balia’s depictions of Italian boulevards, Scheiber’s In the Park (1925) or Carrousel 2 (c. 1925), recall the ambitious futurist injunction to abandon stale themes and embrace speed, machinery, and the turbulence of city crowds. Kádár, too, in his drawing of a horse and carriage, attempted to convey the very vibration and velocity of animal, driver, and vehicle as they clatter down a cobbled street. For Sándor Bortnyik this urban dynamism would be formulated symbolically, employing the fantastical image of churning maelstroms of energy amid factory chimneys in his Cityscape of 1920. While these three artists are relatively unknown today, and derived at least some of their inspiration from better known Western European masters, at least three others achieved international celebrity: László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepés, and Victor Vasarely. Moholy-Nagy was a formidable contributor to the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s. He was invited to join the faculty by Walter Gropius in 1922, and subsequently helped shape — Dezső Komiss, “Un Combat Vain et Cruel — Lautréamont,” 1949 (Dr. M. Mueller Collection) through graphics, design, sculpture, and photography — an aesthetic which we still consider ultra-modern in appearance. That stark geometric look announces itself unequivocally from a cover he designed for the Bauhaus journal, Der Sturm, in 1924, on display in this collection. Kepés, who settled in the United States, and is currently on the faculty of M.I.T., is another irrepressible innovator. His design for a spectacular 100- foot-long blue and red stained-glass mural for the renovated Harvard Square bus station, will be executed in 1984. In contrast, in the current exhibition, Mist Fossil (1978), a painting of surprising delicacy, draws its eloquence from a single, understated image: that of a maple leaf. Kepés apparently pressed the leaf into a medium which combined sand and oil on canvas, and the impression of the object remains. This contemplative work fosters the illusion that it might have been created by either nature or artifice, and its ambiguous texture evokes both the opacity of stone and the evanescence of fog. Unlike Moholy-Nagy and Kepés, who emigrated from Hungary to become part of the international scene, the majority of the seventeen artists featured chose to remain in Hungary. Several came to forge distinctive styles of their own in the small village of Szentendre, near Budapest. Although they have been grouped for convenience under the rubric of “Surrealism,” they managed to synthesize a variety of elements and emerge with a unique, unclassifiable whole, greater than the sum of its parts. Lajos Vajda, Endre Bálint, and Dezső Korniss were in Professor Serenyi’s words, “the most subtle, the most profound. They were aware of what was going on in Paris; Berlin, and with the Russian Constructivists. Yet Szentendre, that environment, helped them create this new art. They altered these modern influences by their consciousness of the Byzantine quality of the town, and its folk inheritance.” One can clearly see the pull of the town upon Vajda’s affections in the way he drew it. Although it was difficult to obtain more than a small sampling of his work for this show, one is impressed by the drawings, by their idiosyncratic composition, their dreamy mood, their reduction of the landscape to its essential linear elements. Vajda’s remarkably assured pencil sketches of the town distill its buildings into uncomplicated, unshaded, rectangular planes; yet the artist mercifully refrains from oversimplifying to the point of alienating his viewer. One of the few artists that come to mind, comparably blessed with such economy of line, is Vienna’s Egon Schiele. The works of Vajda in this show create an appetite for a more definitive selection of his art. If Vajda was Szentendre’s Schiele, his compatriot, Endre Bálint, might surely be considered its Paul Klee. Bálint’s diminutive prints and paintings evoke a sense of myth and mystery seemingly out of proportion to their modest physical dimensions. Mummy, in particular, a gouache completed in 1946, possesses a stained- glass quality; it freezes its dusty, semiabstract pharoah in eternal silence and immobility. The figure itself is encased within borders which both echo the picture frame and create the illusion that we pre perceiving the scene through a transparent pyramid. Korniss’ paintings, represented here by a rigid, surrealist style and a much freer, abstract expressionist drip style, also tend toward the enigmatic. His Dragon of Szentendre (1946) depicts a chilling landscape reminiscent of early Miró or Chirico. In this painting, as well as another, Un Combat Vain et Cruel (1949), which fuses folk art with Lautréamont’s surrealist classic, Les Chants de Maldoror, Korniss blends architecture with stylized figures so that houses and towers seem to have eyes, thoughts, and dreams. His later whimsical drip paintings have a Japanese quality and, indeed, at least one purports to be calligraphic. Although they inevitably draw comparison with Jackson Pollock’s works, Professor Serenyi suggests that their small scale is perhaps as characteristically Hungarian as Pollock’s monumentality is characteristically American. This extraordinary group, which flourished until the late 1940s, was crushed by Stalinism soon thereafter. One of the most refreshing aspects of the exhibition is that it treats us to a selection of fine work firmly entrenched in the major artistic movements of the twentieth century, yet heretofore largely unavailable for examination or enjoyment in this country. This exhibition offers us the opportunity of discovering some new faces working within familiar idioms while creating visions entirely their own. Let us learn Hungarian I’Ve got twenty forints left. I’ve got one hundred forints. I have to manage on this much till Friday. I can get along on four hundred forints a week. I’m saving up (money). I’ve run short of money. I’m rather hard up. I'm broke. Will you lend me ten [a hundred] forints? I will pay you back next month [week]. I’ll let you have the money tomorrow. Could you spare me a few forints? I’ve left my money at home. I forgot to bring any money. How much do you want? Five hundred forints will do, I think. Six hundred (forints) ought to see me through <carry me over). Húsz forintom maradt. Száz forintom van. Ebből kell kijönnöm péntekig. Négyszáz forintból kijövök egy héten. Félreteszem a^pénzemc! Kifogytam a pénzembe Pénzzavarban vagyok. Nincs egy vasam scir. Legyen szives, adjon (aggyon) kölcsön nekem tíz [száz] forintot I A jövő hónapban [héten] visszafizetni Holnap visszafizetem. Ki tudna segíteni eg\ pár forinttal? Otthon felejtettem a pénzemet. Elfelejtettem pénzt hozni. Mennyit parancsol? ötszáz forint elég lej; azt hiszem. Hatszáz (forint) elég kell hogy legyen. LETTER IN THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN Congratulations on your sane reporting of the troubles in Poland. We are constantly being warned of “carefully-orchestrated” campaigns for nuclear disarmament and similar issues: was there ever a more bogus piece of orchestration among the Western media than the hysterical reporting about Poland? The BBC’s World Service in particular has been sickeningly selective with its reporting: the “Listener” regales us with dramatic stories of their gallant band of eavesdroppers at Caverham Park monitoring station, and we learned that six new transmissions beamed at Poland were started with astonishing alacrity. Was there any trace of such a crusading effort when the Colonels took over in Greece? Is there any matching effort over the military tyranny in Turkey? The contradictions are wondrously transparent. Colin Richards,
