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

graphic forms and unusually large engravings, elegant India ink drawings, sheets made with mixed technique, illustrations, art posters, and, of course, dozens of portraits of contemporary and classical writers and poets. These portraits are far from idealizing the authors; they rather search tne depth of soul. For example, the brilliant India ink drawing from 1968, depicting Jenő Tersánszky Józsi, the writer from Nagybánya, contains everything one has to know about this author who turned himself into a novel hero in his own right. As to the engravings, the simultaneous use of large spot-like surfaces and resolute lines, their contrast and harmony was always characteristic to woodcuts and linocuts. In the mid 1960s, Paulovics made a set of linocuts {Carousel, 1965; In the garden, 1 966; City faces, 1966). With their minute details and their figures emerging from behind net- or cobweb-like surfaces, they attest to the artist's technical virtuosity and apparently exceed the possibilities of working with wood or with the softer lino. In the graphic material, there is a separate group of compositions characterized by the signs next to the main motifs, in the same plane.These signs contribute to the interpretation and understanding of the meaning but sometimes they are merely (to put it with a literary term) glosses or personal remarks. * Paulovics was always responsive to the art fends that developed in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century (exceot for the destructive ones, the tendencies denying the actual scenery and the nner, personal message). From his youth, Paulovics held Pablo Picasso's art in great esteem. Picasso 'walked' through almost all of the significant styles of his time and left his indelible mark everywhere. Although the earliest works of Paulovics show some traces of Picasso's impact on him, they do not provide evidence r

or a direct impact at all. Initially, they signaled a compositional relatedness (Staring at the sun, 1 963; Musicians, 1965; Day and Night, 1 967) to Picasso's oeuvre and later on, it was the elegance of drawing and an adherence to mythology that attested to Paulovics's interest in Picasso's art. Here we have to pay attention to three features. First, the artist was always fascinated with Mediterranean atmosphere (which he experienced soon during his travels); second, the ancient world, with its muddled and cruel stories, became a land of tales for him, in the present far from the reality of that epoch; third, his interest in ancient myths grew when he made illustrations for The Centaur, a novel by Updike, due to the importance of the task. Though he had made The apple of Paris, a strongly stylized mythological drawing as early as in 1 965, built mainly on the dynamics of movement, it was in 1974 that he painted The birth of the Centaur which was to be followed by a significant series of drawings when he made illustrations for Updike's novel that proved to be highly successful among Hungarian readers in Romania. The story of The Cen< Szatmári Vénusz - 1973 - tus - 100 x 70 cm