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
a mirror to society scandalized officialdom. Underground Passage I (oil on fibre-wood board, 241 x 170 cm) in the collection of the Municipal Gallery of Budapest gives the impression of an old, cracked-up photo. (111. 1) Both paintings - pendants of one another - depict a common street scene: a staircase leading down into a subway seen, in the first one, from above and, in the other, from down below. Indifferent, people walk up and down, no one looking at the other, no one communicating. In order to depict fleeting time and transience Fehér employed a method of view framing known from the time of Degas and often used in photography whereby a part of the figures in the picture fall outside it. Recalling photos, the black and white colouring is a means of keeping a distance. The painter is outside the picture, and it is with this almost cold, blasé contemplation that he sets the basic tone of the composition. It is a piece of social criticism, much like another masterpiece of Hungarian hyper-realism, the series entitled Lukewarm Water by László Méhes painted in the beginning the decade, and to which Fehér 's Socialist Brigade Logbook ( 1975) is a close parallel. As Fehér's monographer Eva Forgács put it, the two subway pictures "are precise diagnoses of the weary and dull city, its grey, ragged and busted lives." 4 The mundane reality of the painting is the very opposite of party-state ideology, slogans repeated endlessly. NOTES 1 The work has been exhibited in the following places: FAÉV, Székesfehérvár, one-man show, 1979; Triennial of Realist Painters, Sophia, 1979; Arts' Hall, Budapest, one-man show, 1983; Municipal Gallery, Kiscell Museum, Budapest, one-man show, 1993; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Palais Lichtenstein, Vienna, oneman, retrospective exhibition, 1997; HNG, Budapest, Artworks Made to Speak, 2007. 2 I should point out from among his Jewish identity-seeking works the following: Unkempt Cemetery II, 1979, oil on fibre-wood board, 115*60 cm, Déri Museum, Debrecen; LT (Dyptich), 1980, oil on fibre-wood board, 115x160 cm, owner unknown; Feast IV, 1983, oil on canvas, 200 x 140.5 cm, HNG, currently on display at the permanent exhibition of the Contemporary Collection; It Was the Gate of the Ghetto, 1985, oil on fibre-wood board, 195x250 cm, owner unknown. 3 In 1990, László Fehér was the Hungarian exhibitor at the 44 th Venice Biennial, where he achieved resounding international success. The now deceased Katalin Néray, the curator of the biennial, made iron replicas of the contour figures of the paintings, as though redoubling them, stressing their symbolic value. 4 Forgács, Eva. "Fehér László." In: Néray, Katalin ed. Fehér László. Művek 1975-2007. Budapest: Ludwig Múzem - Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum, 2007, p. 16. Éva Forgács's monograph was published in 1998: Forgács, Éva. Fehér László. Budapest: Mediapartners Communication, 1998.
