A Békés Megyei Múzeumok Közleményei 21. (Békéscsaba, 2000)

Gyarmati Gabriella: György Kohán: The Memory of War

Kohán György háború emléke című főműve György Kohán: The Memory of War - Gyarmati Gabriella Rezume György Kohán is the son of a land where East and West meet. His way of thinking and art showed this same duality until the end of his life. He was born into the hard, tragic destitution of the poor of the Hungarian Plain on which was superimposed the strain of Latinized European culture. By the time he was admitted to the College of Arts, he had already been in possession of a discernibly individual style. The following year he was discouraged from continuing his studies. He stays in Budapest, and continues developing his abilities in an autodidactic manner. In 1931 he travels to Paris, where he is commissioned to copy the Works of the great masters of Italian renaissance in the Louvre. Piero della Francesca, Leonardo and Michelangelo teach him a kind of painting characterized by sublimity and noble pathos. Brushstroke by brushstroke, he absorbs both the substance and the techniques of classical presentation. Following the trains of thoughts of old masters, he becomes steeped in the period style ofthat age. When he had sensed and understood the easthetics of bygone ages, his attention turned to the' latest beauty'. He gained access to the new idea of cubism through a study of the masters of postimpressionism, Van Gogh and Cézanne. Picasso and Braque made a profound, 'elementary' impression on his art teaching him to paint forceful and monumental pictures without any contrived postaring. His somewhat brutal way of presentation evoked by the themes and messages of his works was relieved by the intimacy of Kohán's sensibility and outlook on the world. Returning to Hungary, he found himself faced with preparations for the coming war. He could have found shelter in his plans and the new ideas he had become conversant with, but even these ideas turned out to be a weak defence agarost the sights of violence, suffering and senseless death that remained with him and continued to torment him for the long years to come. From 1939 to 1949 he was, almost exclusively, concerning himself with this subject. The plan of his monumetal frieze, The Memory of War, took several different forms over the years; the figures in it repeatedly recur in several tableaus painted by Kohán. With him, theme defines style, and message determines form.His paintings delineating peasant life are realistic, whereas his lyrical wax tempera pictures portraying a host of figures as well as his monumental fresco designs reveal a cubistic tendency with their transected planes and montage technique. The subject of The Memory of War is humiliation, death and grief. The vision of shock that does not tolerate sentimentality. What Kohán thinks is told simply, in a way everyone can understand, as he is talking about something way beyond private mat325