Magyar Hírek, 1985 (38. évfolyam, 2-26. szám)
1985-07-27 / 15-16. szám
PHOTOS: ZOLTÁN KŐHEGYI AND ISTVÁN BALAZS The Endre Nemes Museum at Pécs THE PROFILE OF A PAINTER Ten days before we met Endre Nemes started to paint again, aged seventy-six convalescing after a serious illness. He put the kettle on the hob, offered me some cake but I could tell from his eyes that they and his mind were on the canvas. "I’ve been working on it for fifteen years, that’s how old the idea is, but I lacked the tools of expression. They were not plastic or concrete enough. That’s what I do with many of my pictures. Many a one has travelled the exhibitions but as long as I feel that the effect can be heightened and made more precise I cannot give up.” He has lived all over Europe and right though its twentieth century history. He was born in Pécsvárad. was a child in Igló, and moved to Budapest with his parents when at Secondary School at the Bolyai Farkas Gimnázium in Markó utca, from where he matriculated in 1927 to study philosophy in Vienna. By 1928 he was on the staff of the Kassai Újság. He abandoned his surname Nagel then and published a volume of verse under the nom de plume of Nemes. In the following two years, however,' he earned his living as a caricaturist in Prague and attended Art School there. By 1928, when the threat of fascism drove him to Finland, he was a recognised artist and teacher, but his restlessness drove him on. He arrived in Norway six days before the German invaded. He fled to Sweden and has been living there ever since. His style and message made quite a stir in Sweden. He was the first to enamel techniques for monumental purposes, doing so already in the forties. Nemes frequently exhibited, not only in Sweden but all the way from Bratislava to Montreal and Tel Aviv to Tokyo. He first showed his works in Budapest, at the first “Hommage to the Native Country” display. Later the Museum of Fine Arts arranged a one-man show. The Nemes Endre Museum in Pécs opened its doors in 1983. It is housed in a building scheduled as an ancient monument and now contains 253 works, including collages and canvasses. Endre Nemes III his studio “I have now lived in Sweden for forty-five years, most of my work links me to this country. I have achieved everything that could serve as a symbol of having arrived. Seven of my pictures are on the walls of the House of Parliament and I am a member of the Academy. Yet all the same I am a hard nut to crack for Swedish art historians. They take me seriously-but I often feel that I do not belong to them. In the modern museum they hang my pictures between the French and the American. In Hungary they consider me to be Scandinavian, there, however, my imaginative art cannot be related to many. When it comes to the relationship between abstract painting and the general public. I think I have reached a stage where I am more or less accepted everywhere. My wish is that my pictures should offer what a comfortable armchair does. Leaning back it is easier to turn on the free flow of associations, memories, feelings, and thoughts.” ISTVÁN BALÁZS Endre Nemes.' “The Slandered House", oil, 1967 62
