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

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

as well. In the picture titled Still-life with a Coach (45), a willow-motif occurring in his other works intrudes from above and cuts through the still-life with plate. Thus the artist transformed the wheel of the dead-cart into a Fortune's Wheel, which suggests tragic events. The same willow-motif in the picture titled Collage Crucifix with a Willow (63) is just lying faded and peacefully in front of the corpus at the bottom of the picture. In Graphic Montage with a Self-portrait (67) the still-life with a plate gains a new meaning, it becomes a determining part of the microcosm that the artist is able to and wants to identify himself with. Vajda's creative method involves both conscious construction and instinctive or incidental discovery during a search. He would often cut up his ready drawings and place the parts into new connections, which refer to the fact, that an autonomous work in the traditional sense of the word was questioned for him. The ideas of completion and incompletion gained new meaning. The painting-collage titled Houses of Szentendre with a Crucifix (59) of 1937 became one of the summarising pieces of all these endeavours and, at the same time, it could have been a starting work of the style dreamed up. The collage is not only an outstanding piece of his oeuvre but also a defining item of 20th century Hungarian fine arts. Stuck on the light blue background, there are ordinary and sacred view elements, houses of a small town, the Christ figure of a corpus, and shin-bones across, torn out of their original context are built together outlined in definite contours which, at the same time, carry the traces of the artist's emotional flickers. Placed inconsistently with the Renaissance box-like space as well as the law of gravitation, the group of motifs modelled sensitively yet kept in plane direct the meaning to a spiritual level. The geometrical centre of the picture and the focus of the centrifugal force are at the meeting point of the two architectonic details. Nearby there are the shin-bones to warn you to death. The artistically sarmentuous, brownish garland - which is the detail of a Szentendre well ornament - marks an imaginary motion direction. In a moment, the balance of the pictorial order is upset and it vanishes in time irrevocably. Its falling apart drags down with itself the site of the human-scaled traditional world, the houses of the town. Having lost its cross and fading out through the elements of a house, the figure with arms apart imitating the Christ inscribed on a stone cross in the graveyard of Szigetmonostor is floating in the undetermined space. His gesture is not merely that of the Crucified. It arouses both the image of flying and saving the objects around. The components gather in the picture according to the logic of irrationality: dream, thinking and memory interwoven one another; according to the logic of comprehension but not that of definitive understanding. The chance to develop a style and a movement was given because more and more young artists gathered around Vajda and Korniss in summertime in Szentendre. They had one feature in common: when forming their own style they had not been interested in Nagybánya any more but regarded contemporary European developments as a starting point - as Vajda and Korniss did. However, they could not understand Vajda's endeavours at that time. It was only after his death that they realised the importance of his life-work. Anyway, the last third of the 1930s was not favourable for style-creating intentions in a Europe preparing for a war. Therefore, Vajda was forced to take a lonely way where waste inner lands and dehumanised masks kept watching his steps. From 1937 on, the marks of change can be observed in his drawings. The thick, sensuous forms begin to appear more and more often in the refined, sensitive compositions. Room 4 In the works having come into being between 1935 and 1937 from the interplay of conscious construction and incidental find as well as that of a traditional symbol and an ordinary object, there is still a belief in the perspicuity of the mysterious laws of the world. It is accompanied by the idea the role of the artist, who could open ways to these laws for a community. However, the hopes gradually vanished into thin air. The preconceptions generating his works were so different from those determining the Hungarian art of that 21