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

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

changes, the life-work remained organic: the artist returned to an earlier problem repeatedly and tried to approach it from another point of view. From 1934 on, Vajda made several portraits. In most of them, he tried to catch the most general features of people with a sensitive, one-line drawing. It is interesting that he usually does not depict the black of the eye, which represents instantaneity, and creates a contact with the viewer. In this manner was produced his emblematic Self-portrait of 1936 (38), which seems to have been made of his own classical sculpture. The intentional reduction of pictorial devices and neglecting the sensuous beauties of the material of the picture was related to Vajda's endeavours to convey something from the essence beyond material. The technique of transparent graphic montage elaborated during the Szentendre period also helped him to achieve this purpose. In the graphic montage titled Self-portrait with a Skull (

46), the eye looking at us piercingly under the forehead stigmatised with a motif from gravestones is the centre of the view, and, at the same time, a magic power centre as well. You can get through his eye to the world behind that cannot be named. Vajda, as an artist, determines himself as a mediator between the two spheres. In the composition named Double Portrait (61), - which has several variations - the details of Vajda's features appear mounted into Endre Bálint's head portrait. The ultimately simplified image of the veranda of a house is cast on that. The drawing does not only manifest the emotional and intellectual relation of the two friends but also suggests the idea that the embodiment of an individual subject is not necessarily so extremely limited as it is declared in the age of individuality. The seeming entanglement is organised into unity by a rhomboid shape lying in the centre of the picture. In spite of that, the drawing is constructed according to the structure of associative thinking instead of the laws of an autonomous picture. It was not accidental that Vajda wrote about how you could become a priest of art. He considered art as a way leading from the ephemeral world towards transcendence. He consciously never signed his pictures. He desired to relive the situation of an icon-painter of the Athos Mountain, who does not create but conveys a picture to the community. For the artist, it was not a fashionable role generated by the 19th century but a fate-like commitment. Thus, he almost necessarily got to the reinterpretation of icons. His childhood in Serbia, the settlement of the family in Szentendre, his readings, among which Russian writers like Dostoievski or Berdiaiev - who was famous for his personal philosophy - played an important part, were all moments that encouraged him to find the chance of attachment to tradition in this picture type, which has hardly changed for centuries. In the paintings produced in 1936, the almost brutally simple figures painted in hardly a few colours are not the representations of reality but the projections of an elemental man-image. In the picture titled Fair (41), it is completed with an ability to get to the core, which resembles the main feature of children's drawings. It is accompanied with strange, a bit dissonant colouring and thick contours - like an ancient barbarian inner rhythm. Vajda created the tension of icon heads with the method that, against the expectations, it is not saints, who are given an aura, but ordinary people like the peasant woman of Black Icon (37), who is raised into a new kind of sacredness, where the regular hierarchy of transcendence created in Christianity is questioned. Icon-like Self-portrait (36) is a summing piece of such endeavours and, at the same time, prepares one of the most enigmatic paintings of Hungarian art, Icon-like Self-portrait Pointing Upwards, which has been analysed by several people and which is preserved in a private collection. In Icon-like Self-portrait, Vajda approached his own portrait to the traditional representations of icon heads, pushing into the background all individual features. Merely the inner proportions of the most essential lineaments refer to his character. The hair was transubstantiated into an aura. The dark blue colour cape verging on violet indicates a state of intensive intellectual concentration - in accordance with tradition. The effect of representation is enhanced by the fine vertical pleats of the clothes and the emphatic vertical axis too. The ochre of the background turns into gold before your very eyes. Parallel with these pictures, the artist was engaged in improving the compositional solutions appearing in Double Portrait. 19