Magyar Hírek, 1985 (38. évfolyam, 2-26. szám)

1985-09-21 / 19-20. szám

The Painting of Endre Bálint

To honour his 70th birthday Endre Bálint was given a retrospective at the Műcsarnok, and his book Életrajzi törmelékek (Biographic Fragments) was published, showing his great skills as a writer as well.

The first sentence takes the reader close to the essence, since it is a testimony on the art of our age. The sacral epithet associated with the word ‘modern’ tells much in itself. It proves that Bálint does not regard 20th century art as a sequence of schools, let alone a race of isms and trends. Modern means more to him than novelty. Later, quoting his master, the greatest figure of Hungarian art between the two wars, Lajos Vajda, then Carl Einstein, he talks about the “primeval form” as the essence of the modern, “of the secret, abstract contents” of things, of one of the sources of the revolutionary in the art of our century, therefore of the relationship of the old and the new. This is a relationship which only those can express, who are able to resist the temptation of what is merely timely, rejecting fashions that soon become conventional, offering—like the artists of prehistoric times—that which is indispensable to the community and each and every member of it, like Picasso, Klee and Vajda. Innate dexterity, aestheticism, literariness, sham pathos, let alone the business spirit and business-justified fraud are far from the modern and sacred. “... I give credence to the truth of play only, but I believe only in the seriousness of truth”—he writes distinguishing betwen the unscrupulousness of the epigoni travelling with the avantgarde, and the revolutionary spirit and attitudes of Duchamp and Ernst. He believes that the lack of faith characterizes the product of the imitator made to meet cheap commercial demand. Bálint does not think the word crisis lacks justification when talking about contemporary art. One should have all of this in mind when reading him, some of the most beautiful words ever written by a Hungarian artist: “...the colours are chasing one-another from the eye to the heart, and from the heart to absolution that takes shelter among memories and colours. From absolution through the form to the picture. It is always the picture that means absolution from anguish to me, the fearless moment that relief bars fear, in order to let everything start all over again in the traps of the tormented soul, in the memories that press the heart, in reliving that keeps colours in sadness. This state is still more genuine and better than the crises caused by impotence, the paralysis of the spirit, the trembling incapacity of the Hand, and the knowledge that even a miracle cannot be expected with an empty soul, without faith, and without perceiving the colours.”

Here are then the key-words of Bálint’s art: anxiety, fear, absolution, faith; even when he was still searching for his true self, his own world of form and colour through accepting and processing effects in order to make himself speak his

62