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

Intra Maros The years in the Partium region, 1961-1985 If we believed in predestination, we would (and let us admit, we do) think that, in the life of the fifth-year art student, there was an ineluctable event, a moment that affected his entire career

—the meeting with György Harag, a director well known inside and outside Transylvania. This is the beginning of a period, lasting for a quarter of a century, which Paulovics will spend as a stage and costume designer. Although he never enjoyed noisy and spectacular events in his private life by nature, his intellectual companions were writers, poets and theatre people. His Szatmár studio became an intellectual workshop, a place for intellectual self-instruction and lively debates. Its members'continued'the dramas they nad just seen and criticized actors and directors. They scrutinized the ideas of authors like Updike, Osborne, Molière, Imre Madách, etc., which had meant something else where they had been conceived than in Szatmár, Nagybánya, Nagyvárad, Marosvásárhely, etc., where Hungarian and Romanian audiences were forbidden to think freely. For Paulovics, his work at the theatre was not just an activity restricted to stage design, unlike for many artists, who occasionally earned money or satisfied their curiosity in this field. InTransylvania, Imre Baász, a genial avant-garde artist, LászlóTóth, a professor from Kolozsvár, and even the sculptor András Kós made stage designs by chance. We can add some examples from the Paris art scene of the 1920s, where Braque, De Chirico, Derain, Miró, Max Ernst, Matisse and Picasso made stage designs for Diaghilev's world famous Russian Ballet, but these works were exceptions within their oeuvres. By contrast, Paulovics gained valuable experience from his activity at the theatre, which he could integrate organically into his oeuvre, both as a painter and a graphic artist. These skills enabled him to form, see and organize space. (This interplay was very well explained by Lajos Kántor, literary historian and aesthetician, an expert on Paulovics's work, in a book that appeared in the 'Gallery' series of the Kriterion publishing house: László Paulovics, introduced by Lajos Kántor, Kriterion, Bucharest, 1983, hereafter: L. K., cit.) As a matter of fact, a painter must transpose the three dimensional space into the two dimensional plane but he/she resolves the problem easily by making use of the given situation in order to express his/her inner message. It is not difficult to notice the similarity between the phalanstery scene of Imre Madách's drama, The Tragedy of Man, and the psychological and physical conditions of East Central European countries of that time. Paulovics designed brilliant stage scenery, despite the low budget, for the Nagyvárad performance of Madách's drama in 1974. From box- or wardrobe-like compartments, located on both sides of the stage, 'impersonalized', puppet-like figures step out, engendering a vision of the disillusioning future of mankind. The stage scenery bears a striking similarity to one of Paulovics's oil paintings, called Mythology (1972), depicting Hellenistic (or classical Greek) wise men, who come forward from behind open doors, with their heads resembling marble statues, and their bodies made of a coarse material resembling wooden boards;