Gyergyádesz László, ifj.: Kecskemét és a magyar zsidó képzőművészet a 20. század első felében (Kecskemét, 2014)
Jegyzetek
disquietingly beautiful, what is the point of doing so? Maybe, nobody needs it.” His sculptural characteristic features were individually improved and formed not during his official studies, but on the basis of his experiences in museums (Michelangelo, Greek sculptors, plastic art of East Asia and Ancient Egypt) of Paris (Louvre, Musée Guimet) and Berlin (Altes Museum). Observing the cogency of his evolving sculpture purely on the basis of the genre, Frigyes Karinthy did not accidentally write that “the soul is progressive, and only the body is immortal. Maybe, he is right.” On the Asphalt Paver modelled in 1943 (page 29) ordinariness and mythicality form a unit in its unmovable monumentality The general characterization of Ernő Kállai written six years earlier is especially relevant, and can almost be adapted to any work of Bokros: “The austerity of the Old Testament and the cold global consciousness of universal human distress and fallibility are reflected in this sculptural art rather than social criticism, compassion or glorification. Bokros Birman regardless of class-division, ruthlessly and with stern straightforwardness reproaches a human being with the fact that he was made out of the material, mud and the dust.” “Those Jewish artists who had previously taken a part in the avant-garde and emigrated for a shorter period of time or had never left the country... irretrievably became narrow and returned to the style of Post Impressionism which was solely tolerated, but it was undeveloped compared to the taste of the era. To mention just some examples of this phenomenon: that happened to Sándor Ziffer, Armand Schönberger, Rudolf Diener-Dénes who stayed in Hungary, and to Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba and his wife Margit Gráber or Dezső Orbán who were in emigration for a shorter time, and also to Béla Kádár after his successful eight-year long emigration in Berlin”. In spite of the strong statement of Miklós Flernádi, in the case of the last artist he adds that “it is not a small honour of the Hungarian art history that some of the aquarelles of Béla Kádár were declared to be »degenerative art« according to Hitler, and were selected into the collection of the dunce's seat’ exhibition and auction of the Entartete Kunst in 1937.” We are displaying less recognized works of three of the above mentioned artists at the exhibition (one of each) from their “greyer” period. In the case of the painter Béla Kádár (originally Klug, 1877-1956), who came from a poor Jewish family of German origin, his artworks made in the middle and the second half of the 1920s are appreciated the most. This is Ámos Imre: Önarckép / Imre Ámos: Self Portrait (1941) mainly due to the international success of Kádár that initiated with his individual exhibition at the gallery of Der Sturm in Berlin in December 1923, then owing to the recommendation of its director Flerwarth Walden it could continue in the USA for a couple of years. Despite the above discussed events, the art critic Ernő Kállai, who lived in Germany at that time, did not have a high opinion of the works representing considerable influence of Chagall: “The expressionism of Kádár got lost in the formality of the ornamentation and the ethnography of the Hungarian village. [...] He is a typical tendency-painter of the just-expressionist kind who only juggles where others reveal shocking profundity with their art.” Two decorative compositions drawn with black tempera can be seen on both sides of the small-sized sheet of Kádár preserved in Kecskemét which were made long after the earlier mentioned period. The influence of Art Deco and Neoclassicism can be detected especially in the sketch titled the Urban Scene (page 58). “If he were not so orientally lazy he would be among the greatest. Thus who knows if he ever becomes a well known name?” That was the opinion of the senior master of the Eight, Károly Kern- stok about the young Róbert Berény (1887-1953). He was one of the most outstanding, the most versatile and the most likely experimenting artists of the Hungarian Fauves and the Eight who was forced to emigrate to Wien and then to Berlin after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Although 61
