Magyar Hírek, 1987 (40. évfolyam, 1-23. szám)
1987-03-07 / 5. szám
AT SÁROSPATAK WITH JÓZSEF DÓMJÁN József Dómján will be eighty on the 15th of March this year. He was born in Kispest, where he was an apprentice motor mechanic and later a boilermaker. He enrolled at the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts in 1935 and studied under István Szőnyi. From the mid-forties onwards he regularly showed exhibitions of wood-cuts all the way from Miskolc to Stockholm and from London to Lugano. He produced series about Miklós Toldi and Antal Nagy of Buda in 1956, when he was awarded the Kossuth prize. On October 20 the same year a one-man show of his opened in Geneva. Hearing news of events in Hungary persuaded him, to stay in Switzerland. The following year he moved to New York where he has lived ever since. * József Domján’s peacock is a mixture of myth and reality. His head is small, his corwn is a bunch of grapes and a leafy branch. He holds a flowering twig in his beak. Kodály and Bartók found the time and the words of the song “Fölszállott a p<im. . .” (The peacock rose up. . .) just about everywhere where Hungarian is spoken by natives. “This folk-song is an authentic expression of Domján’s art” said Ferenc Béres, a singer, when opening the Dómján Permanent Exhibition at Sárospatak. The peacock is the symbolic bird of happiness, the bird of freedom. It is an ancient Hungarian motive, an expression of the soul of our people. 1 was talking to the artist sitting among wallhangings, paintings and engravings, surrounded by his family furniture. Pictures produced on a trip to China are shown in a separate room, and there is a diploma in a show-case attesting that József Dómján is a honorary tátizen of Sárospatak. Coloured wood-cuts cover the walls of the basement of the Permanent Exhibition the fantastic world of Hungarian mythology. I saw something similar in the workshop of Jenő Szervát i vis, the Kolozsvár sculptor. “Do you know what is below this basement?” Dómján asked. “A tunnel filled witli earth! When the town was besieged by Turks, a messenger stole out through this tunnel to obtain help from the fortress of Munkács, as ancient tales tell us.” * József Domján’s memoirs Graven linages was published by Gondolat Publishers, Budapest. Evelyn, the wife of the artist recorded the life story of her husband as he recalled it for the “Write it!” competition of Macfy&x Hírek. The richly illustrated volume with Péter János Sós’s introduction was based on this work, which won the first prize. The artist dedicated it to his eight grandchildren “in the hope that one perhaps of them may read it in Hungarian. . ” * In the spring of 1955 Aron Tamási the writer opened József Domján’s one-man show with an address entitled “Graven images” at the Ernst Museum in Budapest. Thus the artist borrowed the title of his recently published memoirs from the writer. Not a copy of the catalogue in which Tamási’s introduction was printed was thought to have survived, and József Dómján could not quote from it. The Address was not included in Tamási’s collected works either. 1 telephoned the widow of Áron Tamási to ask her if there was perhaps a draft among Tamási’s papers. Indeed, she found it! Here are the words of Áron Tamási himself: “The pictures at this exhibition are by an artist, who has faith in what he is doing. Putting one’s faith in the pioneering work of the mind is a captivating human feature even in itself. But when it is not accompanied by the special quality people call talent, PHOTO: VIKTOR GABOR than it only makes one an eccentric or a wasted man obsessed by an idea:” “I consider József Dómján to be not only a faithful but also a talented artist. . .” “. . .in my wanderings 1 like to pause before one or another of his pictures, after which I go on my way more cheerfully.” “If I could I would not sing a ballad, on rny way but a romance.” ÁDÁM BALÁZS 31
