Veszprémi Nóra - Jávor Anna - Advisory - Szücs György szerk.: A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve 2005-2007. 25/10 (MNG Budapest 2008)

NEW ACQUISITIONS, NEW RESULTS - Zsuzsa JOBBÁGYI: László Fehér: Underground Passage II

ZSUZSA JOBBÁGYI László Fehér: Underground Passage II LÁSZLÓ FEHÉR: UNDERGROUND PASSAGE II, 1978 (Colour Plate XIX) Oil on fibrewood, 241 x 170 cm Inv. no.: MM.2004.21 László Fehér

's Underground Passage //was acquired by the Contemporary Collection of the Hungarian National Gallery in 2004.' The acquisition was regarded as making up for a want as the Gallery had owned works by the artist from his various periods, but none from his earliest. Even as a fledgling, László Fehér was a seminal figure in Hungarian fine arts at the end of the last century. He had studied under Lajos Szentiványi and Ignác Kokas at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1971 and 1976. He acquired a forthrightness, a supreme reverence of craftsmanship and a humbleness in face of art from his masters, but he did not follow them in externals and style. From the beginnings, his career has been a sequence of linear stages built on one another. Each of his periods derive from the one preceding it. In the few years after his graduation, he was drawn to photorealism, its means being closest to him at the time. He did not join any group. Though he does belong to sur-naturalism hallmarked by the names of Tibor Csernus, László Lakner, László Méhes and the larger stream of Hungarian hyper-realism, he did not follow these trends, but was only attracted to them temporarily. Throughout his career, he has been recording events around him, either looking at them from without or driven by emotions within. In these early photorealistic works, he describes states and mundane scenes he is either partaker or only observer of, documenting them with an honest and reserved aloofness. In his later canvases of quest for identity made with passionate sweeps of brush, Jewish faith is revived.

2 From then on, the events that happened to him and his family - as a kind of private mythology - appear in his paintings, which sometimes have portrait-like, sometimes ghost images or contours for their figures.

3 Suiting his desire for expression, his colouration is either reduced to yet one or two colours, or is broadened and lightened up. Due to a factor of uncertainty - a feature of the times -, his pictures often point towards transcendence, as though their personae were not of this world. Either as a starting point or as a memory or an event-sparking moment on the plane of thought, or as the basis of representation, photo as such is almost always present in his art. The first piece in his Underground Passage series was painted in 1975, while the one the HNG recently acquired was completed 1, László Fehér: Underground Passage I, 1975 Budapest History Museum, Municipal Picture Gallery in 1978. Whatever official ideology proclaimed, this was the period of economic recession, of which nothing was to be said at official fora. This was the peak period of "bums", the so-called "subway generation". A sense of crisis filled the air, and was - in spite of all dictatorial prohibitions and not for the first time the course of Hungarian history - given expression and relief in the various branches of art, whether in pop music or painting. It was no wonder that the work of the young artist graduate holding up