Hann Ferenc: Paulovics. Kántor Lajos és Kocsis István írásaival (A PMMI kiadványai. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága – Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre, 2008)

Hann Ferenc - The artist's career: an overview

majority of professors were Hungarians from Transylvania. Students from the Partium, the Székelyföld (Székler area) and Marosvásárhely were willing to learn in Kolozsvár. The staff that taught Paulovics included Zoltán Andrássy, painter and graphic artist, Tibor Erdős, Sándor Mohi, painters; Jenő Szervátiusz, and András Kós, son of the polymath Károly Kós, sculptors. The most important from the staff must have been Tibor Kádár. Many of his former students remember him by his exceptional charisma. Kádár's strong influence shaped considerably Paulovics's perspectives on art. During 'socialist realism', at the turn of the 1950s to the 1960s, he analyzed avant-garde works in his lessons. It is easy to find out what consequences his courage had; he committed suicide in 1 962. Paulovics remarked, 'One could learn the craft from Tibor Kádár. Those who learned from him could start a carrier with a good reputation. He was strict and, fortunately, cruel. He did not like "beautiful" drawings and preferred excitingly imperfect, well-constructed works. "You must draw so that your effort burn your lips," he reminded us, meaning that you had to concentrate very strongly. He had an inner fire and if you paid attention to him, you got the flame from him. He was the key figure whose influence made students keep on working within the craft.' Károly Vilhelm, a good friend of Paulovics, and a former student of Kádár wrote an assessment, both objective and moving, of the tragic fated master, on the occasion of a commemorative exhibition. (It was published in Hét, February 2, 1973, and reedited by Zoltán Banner in Szó, eszme, látvány 1920-2000, Mentor, Marosvásárhely, 2002.) The former student mentioned, among others, that Kádár had analyzed Cezanne's and József Egry's works, and added something that sounds incredible today: according to him, Kádár referred often to Pierre Soulage, the French gesture painter whose name was almost unknown even to artists living in Hungary, who were a little bit better informed than their counterparts in Romania at that time. It would be pointless to seek for direct connections among these early impressions and the passionate gestures appearing on Paulovics's canvases during his German emigration, in the early 1990s, and especially on the coeval series of his graphic works, called D'43, commemorating the tragedy of Hungarian soldiers who died in 1 943, at the river Don. Obviously, passion is not a conscious element; still, it is there. Maybe the fire, mentioned by the artist in connection with Tibor Kádár, reawakened in him. After finishing his studies in 1961, Paulovics was employed by the Nagybánya museum, and then worked as a stage and costume designer for the Drama Theatre of Nagybánya and the Northern Theatre of Szatmárnémeti. In 1964, after the years of preparation, he started his rich and autonomous career, related to many art trends but hardly following any. His oeuvre was not being built linearly; it did not have a solid basic theme expanded, enriched and transformed throughout the decades (like the oeuvre of 3T