Mazányi Judit szerk.: Vajda Lajos Emlékmúzeum, Szentendre / katalógus (PMMI, Szentendre, 2008)

Way to what cannot be named. Lajos Vajda's career

spiritual development was influenced by his ideas. The experiences in Paris determined the main directions of Vajda's interest for his whole career though hardly a few works remained from this period of his. He was living in such misery conditions that he had to steal out his hotel room, leaving his works behind. Based on the antecedents, it is a logical consequence that most of the works made in Paris were photomontages which could be done at a relatively low cost. The principle of montage is an important element of 20th century thinking. Artists of this time experimented with the montage-technique when they tried to bridge over the tormenting controversies of the basic experience worded by Endre Ady at the beginning of the century: "Everything that was whole has broken up, every flame just flashes partially ..." With the technique of photomontage, artists stick ready-made picture pieces of reality beside each other so that the elements arousing various associations should provoke new and unusual ideas in the viewers, preventing them from drawing stereotyped conclusions. The fragments of pictures created at the different intersections of space and time associated according to principles similar to the bizarre logic of dreams - sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing with each other - break through the rational crust of human world to bring up hardly formulated ideas from the depths of subconscious or even unconscious. Most montages have an ambiguous character. Vajda feels exactly the possibilities of montage therefore some of his works escape the grasp of verbal or definition-like interpretations. However, looking at a few of his montages you can recognise Vajda's main circles of idea: beside the representation of modern human defencelessness, people in moments of abandonment appear in the composition titled Gustave Fleury (9). Women of cultures existing outside Europe, who hand down traditions of ancient origin, bear their fate with dignity or spontaneous naturalness amongst destruction in Chinese Execution (7), and impassivity accompanies outrageous cruelties of every day. Beauty and threatening are present side by side in the montage Panther and Lily (8), and the picture of skull warns you to the evanescence of such things. The cruel and concrete pictures of reality often contradicting each other's meaning, reflect the artist's opinion of his age, who is still moving at a material level. These montages meant the real beginning of Vajda's artistic career. Though taking his own course, he gradually got farther and farther, he often looked back on the starting-points. Room 2 Vajda returned from Paris in the middle of 1934. During the autumn, he attended Vaszary's private course. Endre Bálint, the later friend, once heard Vaszary's following remark concerning Vajda: "I think you'd better not correct that artist; he has nothing to learn from us." That was true because by that time Vajda had been mature enough in both technical knowledge and intellectual experiences to start his own way. His still- lifes reflect the change between the attitude of a student of the academy and that of an artist having returned from Paris. In his painting titled Still-life with a Candle and Flowery Jug of 1928 (4), the pulsing colour contrasts and lingering upon the eventuality of forms, reveal the intention to fix the momentary, sensuous impressions of reality in spite of the top-view observation of the motifs. In the pastel titled Still-life on a Horseshoe-shape Table of 1934 (13), with the fine harmonies of complementary colours, the hard and a little dissonant rhythm of dark and light patches, the objects depicted from different points of view and the plaster mask covered with a kerchief enigmatically, Vajda reorganizes the original view on the plane according to an inner visual order. The inner order - which pointed increasingly towards a world beyond the visible one remained a basic measure with Vajda all the time even if his work could be developed or was woven of entangled lines. The short mature period was sectioned further according to the problem circles dealt by the artist. Either spiritual challenges or formal solutions gave the impulses to keep creation in motion. Despite the seeming 18