Mazányi Judit szerk.: Kandó Gyula (1908–1968). A festőművész hagyatékának bemutatása. (PMMI kiadványai - Kiállítási katalógusok 5. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, Szentendre, 2003)

from European School in 1946) delegated him to the third exhibition of Salon des Réalités Nouvelles to be arranged in July, 1947. However, he does not occur in the catalogue of the exhibition. Finally, with the recommendation of the department of Foreign Cultural Connection of the Ministry of Religion and Education, he, together with his family and 15-20 pictures, travelled to Paris again. His art seems to have been influenced not by the work of the artists of Réalités Nouvelles but much rather by the international surrealist exhibition arranged in the Galerie Maeght in 1947 as well, as his picture Still-life with a Jug and Fruit painted in 1948 testifies. As a late follower of Arcimboldo, he combined traditional motifs in a strange and playful way in order to develop the profile of a classical sculpture. At the end of 1948 or 1949, Kandó leaving his family behind in France, returned home - just for some orientation. Presumably, however, the political events of "the year of the turn" prevented him from travelling back abroad. Missing a family background as well as a safe living, after one-year stay in Budapest, he settled in Szentendre in 1950. According to memories, he was living in miserable conditions. It is probable that he tried to live on designing posters and doing illustrations. He might have been influenced in his decision for the town on the Danube-bank by the memories of the hours spent there with the Bortnyik-school and those of the trips of the movement as well as by his friends who were attached to the town. In the first half of his Szentendre period he did not participate in exhibitions at all and it was only from 1957 on that he presented one or two works at local shows. During the Rákosi-era, - according to the evidence of the bequest he only tried faintly acquiring the dominant social-realistic style within the scope of applied arts. His unbroken interest in modern art can be proved with the fact that meanwhile, he borrowed banned books on modern arts from an acquaintance of his holding a leading post at the University Library - whom he had established contact with during his years in Paris. In 1956, Béla Bán, who had been working at the Old Colony of Artists, emigrated to France and handed his studio over to Gyula Kandó. The artist's last, and, from the point of view of the oeuvre, the most important period, during which he got from surrealism to nonfigurativeness. started in the second half of the 1950's. Several outer impulses promoted to bring about the spiritual conditions of some groups of works of different character. What makes difficult dating the works is that Kandó was dealing with questions of different starting points parallel and there are whole groups where we cannot find any works dated so in a few cases we can only rely on suppositions. He first took part in an exhibition in 1957 with a work - unidentifiable today - titled Composition. The painting Phantom Tower can date from the same period. The planes determined by reddish orange, veil white and dirty blue colours are layered behind each other irregularly as though they opened a window onto worlds with different parameters and in the confusing space the trace of a Baroque church tower seems to appear. There is a similar visionary character in his work titled Szentendre Town Hall painted in 1968, in the year of his death. What keeps occurring from among the solutions of the earlier painting in several successive works is - instead of a surface built up of traditional painterly gestures - the conscious, meaningful, sensitive and unusual elaboration of the facture, recalling some painterly methods of surrealism. Facture in Hungarian art had an important role like that in the works of the masters of European School, among them mostly in Tihamér Gyarmathy's works made in the second half of the 1940's then, from different starting points, has gained more and more ground from the 1960's on. In Eye-head with Sea Beings made in 1958, where - according to one possible interpretation - in the blueness recalling the sunlit shallow sea, planktons are flickering and sea stars are floating around a strange and a bit threatening jelly-fish-like being, also the facture has one of the most important roles. The experience of the surrealist way of thinking with Kandó is accompanied with motifs borrowed from Miró and Arp, the classical masters of the school, and in several cases, we can discover obvious analogies between Willi Baumeister's works. In Kandó's paintings objects sometimes transform into humorous beings, figures recall never-existing animals and the compositions constructed with laconic simplicity sometimes remind you of absurd aphorisms or unsolvable picture-puzzles, while in other cases, the geometric forms coming to life make the viewer become an eye-witness of events with unknown end. Kandó began to apply letters, numbers, abstract signs and objects simplified into signs together as early as in 1958 and - presumably - used these motifs for building up compositions up to the mid-1960's. While in cubism a letter creates a milieu, in constructivism it is a constructive element, in dadaism or later in pop-art it is often the object of destruction, in Hungarian art - with Lili Országh - it recalls a circle of civilisation and, at ;he same time, the trace of human culture, with Kandó, who studied to become an advertising graphic artist, a letter is an after-image occurring in a subjective, lyrical context, the same as a horse-head sign-board or the torso of a stone angel with Endre Bálint. In 1959, the artist visited his sister, Magda Kandó, ceramist living in Turkey, and arranged there an exhibition. The experience of getting free after so many years of closure, facing a new sphere of culture and meeting his sister must have set free huge positive energies in him. He created the most authentic series of his oeuvre, Istanbul, whose pieces and the works standing close to them deserve a special interest not because of their extraordinary originality but because the non-figurative, surrealistic elements known from his earlier periods got saturated with personal experiences and became organized into coherent inner visions presented in deeply glowing colours. Though he was at home again in 1960 and appeared at an exhibition of the artists living in Szentendre, he could have realized soon that his pictures leaving the transcription of natural view far behind them would be but closed again within the walls of the studio by the cultural policy of that time. This could have been one of the reasons - besides his wish to see his children remaining abroad - why he went to Paris again at the end of 1960 or at the beginning of 1961. Though - perhaps hoping for some support - he offered his work to the Foundation for Intellectual Freedom and gained financial assistance from one of the programs of The United Nations Organization and also presented a small collection at an exhibition in Amsterdam in the same year, he could not have produced the conditions for a permanent settlement. So he returned to Szentendre again, probably in 1964. From this period in Paris, we know only a few pictures. These