Nagy Ildikó szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 1992-1996 (MNG Budapest, 1998)

IN MEMORIAM - In remembrance of Béla Szíj (Szabó, Lilla)

In remembrance of BÉLA SZÍJ (September 3, 1923 - February 2, 1993) Only a year or two separate us from the end of the century; there are ever fewer people who can speak about the first decades of our modern age as eye-witnesses. Vanishing are the people who had a firm knowledge and orientation to address the values planted and conserved in art - in music, literature and the visual arts - of the indigestible twentieth century, leaving us born after World War II to ourselves. We feel - rightly - the hiatus created by history between us and the past, our past. Professor Béla Szíj was one of the chain-links. When you pass down the corridors of the Hungarian National Gallery, with a newly recovered Egry, Nemes Lampérth, Berény, Gulácsy or Béla Kádár picture which you are to define as original or forged, you feel inevitably: he has bequeathed us a hard legacy. The legacy of the void, of uncertainty. Perhaps because he also felt the evil eye of the uninvited midwives around the delivery of training and knowledge, he turned inward towards the precise recognition and elaboration of facts. It is only in retrospect that we understand the "doubt" in his uncertain answers to our questions, the constantly lurking scepticism despite the enormous knowledge: can you really declare something as absolutely certain...? Towards the end of his life, he also taught us to administer caution. It is hard after all to attribute something unambiguously, assuming full responsibility. And again, his embarrassing hesitation must also have been a mark of respect and indulgence towards the weaker party on the other side of the obvious gap in knowledge. Both are hard to bear. He worked immensely much, that is, all the time. He had an esteem for what he knew, he cared for values only, and wished to pass on the respect of values. That was why he was The Professor, although he had never taught. He should have had a chair at the university, and the interactive relationship with the younger generations might have "saved" him from his increasingly severe and unsurmountable loneliness. In his writings and lectures, he did not discuss art airtight, but against the background of a detailed analysis of the social and cultural constituents. His target was absolute precision in the data, and with those in store, he presented his topic with coruscating wit, leading the reader or listener easily amidst the interrelated web of literature, music and painting. While writing about the painter in his grand monograph of Gulácsy, he also reveals his own method and approach: "In his works, he summarizes what he has seen of the essence of things, then he Hashes up in a peculiar reformulation what the artists of earlier times thought to be important when they presented messages similar to his. And this he does in a way that people of future times will also be able to recognize almost with the impact of first-hand experience that of constant human emotions and natural peculiarities - changing from age to age yet unchanged in their essentials - which only the capacity of artistic creation can grasp and perpetuate. He also writes in the preface to this book: "When researchers give titles to works born from such a complex inspiration, then it is not only characterless and unpoetical but also mistaken. A work of art may naturally be a lasting value without a title, but when a researcher makes the attempt to survey an entire lifework, he will need the exact titles and dates of creation of possibly all the works. A systematization based on style criticism can approach the once real situation only approximately, unlike an arrangement based on both chronology and style criticism." His main research field was 20th century Hungarian ait. up to the fifties. In his writings, the contributors of the periodical Nyugat, as well as Ady, Berény, Nemes-Lampérth, Tihanyi, and especially Egry and Gulácsy were inseparable, as were Bartók and Kodály from them. He had two homes: the National Gallery and Pápa. One was the institutional venue of his work, his service to the profession and the nation, the other - with the Protestant College at the head - was the spiritual milieu that launched him on his course. In 1995, Pápa staged a commemorative exhibition. The little catalogue contains information we had only a vague idea of. One realized that the time perspective also puts him in a historical, culture historical context. His sister he had spoken about so much, Mrs Erzsébet Galánfi-Szíj writes with succinct simplicity: "At Balatonszárszó, he took part in the meeting of popular writers. On the way home on the train, the art historian Ernő Kállai directed his attention to József Egry. After the secondary school, he studied law in Budapest, upon his father's request. But he took every opportunity to train himself in music and the arts. For Christmas 1944, he remained in the "House of Students" where he and several other students were taken prisoners of war. He got home enfeebled from the POW hospital at Gödöllő. From then on, his only interest was art. He resumed his studies at the faculty of art. However, he was expelled from the university as unwanted. He did hard and responsible physical work in a plastic factory in Pest for years. Then he got back to the university and finished his studies. His interest in art and music history never stopped in the hardest times, either..." We - his colleagues - never knew he was in Szárszó, he had contact with the popular writers; it was his sister's concise summary that made us realize his life-long interest in Egry upon Ernő Kállai's influence, and Kállai's name explains his attachment to the group Eight, to Gulácsy... He was a highly rational and sensitive person. The catalogue mentioned above lists his writings published between 1959 and 1992. His big monograph of Béla Kádár and the representative Bertalan Székely album never appeared in print. His last road led him to the National Gallery, on 2 February 1993. He walked the "garden of the wizard". His living memory is slowly giving way to remembrance. Lilla Szabó