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

LÓRÁND BERECZKY: The First Fifty Years - 50™ ANNIVERSARY OF THE HUNGARIAN NATIONAL GALLERY - Éva BAJKAY: Collecting Avant-Garde - A Subjective History

ÉVA BAJKAY Collecting Avant-Garde - A Subjective History In the second half of the 1960s, in the period of the so-styled New Economic Mechanism, new cultural opportunities opened up. With the Iron Curtain sometimes cautiously lifting, certain intellectuals and artists managed to travel abroad, and thus embark on their long-awaited encounters with modernism. Looking back from today, it would be difficult to call this a beautiful period, especially to describe it as a "golden age,"

1 and those of us who began our careers in its midst little understood the changes taking place. The fourteen art-history students who graduated every two years found it difficult to get a job, but they took the museological practice in the last semester of their university education very seriously. I myself had occasion to absolve this duty at the Department of Painting of the National Gallery under Éva Bodnár, and I wanted to do research on the Age of Reform (1825^48) artists who had worked abroad. Not sufficiently well-connected, I could only hope for a job if I did my utmost best. From the autumn of 1967,1 started working at the National Gallery on a thousand-forint stipend from the Fine Arts Fund, which was then the all-inclusive arts body in charge of finances, as well, and hoped to be tenured eventually. Also, I had a part-time job thanks to the Art History Documentation Centre headed by Lajos Németh, ensuring an entry in my Worker's Licence,* and made card indices at the National Széchényi Library in the evenings. I was as inexperienced as any career starter, and was taken by surprise when, on October 1, 1968, director general Gábor Ö. Pogány required me to go to the Keleti (Eastern) Railway Station at ten o'clock at night and welcome Béla Uitz arriving on the train from Moscow, and also to be his escort, as I spoke both Russian and German.

2 My task was to engage the master and not let him "disturb" the preparations for his retrospective exhibition on the ground floor of the National Gallery (then still in the building of the former High Court). I could hardly fathom what my task really was, but that it would not be easy I gathered from Pogány 's last remark that if I could not manage, he would have a lad sent instead of me.

3 At the university, we hardly learned anything about the former avant-garde, constructivist, left-wing artist, Béla Uitz (18871972), who had been living in Moscow since 1926. The only work by him the permanent exhibition of the National Gallery displayed was the 1916 Fruit Harvesters from his Kecskemét period. I had known his colleague József Nemes Lampérth much better by experience, Anna Zádor having held her university lectures on him at his exhibition in 1963. We were getting increasingly aware of the Activists (a Hungarian avant-garde group), I was even allowed 1. Béla Uitz and Éva Bajkay in Pécs, 1968. Photograph in possession of the author to write my seminar paper on one of László Moholy-Nagy's Bauhaus books (Malerei, Fotografie, Film. Munich, 1925; in Hungarian, it came out as late as 1978). In 1961, Dénes Pataky arranged the prints and drawings show of The Eights and Activists in the HNG, which was followed by The Eights and the Circle of the Activists Krisztina Passuth curated at the St. Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár.

4 Uitz's most often reproduced pictures, one or two etchings from his General Ludd series, had alarmed me. (111. 5) I was trembling as I went to welcome the artist. The VIP lounge was teeming with people. Short welcome speeches were made by ministry, party and art society officials, who then disappeared, and I was left to accompany the artist to his hotel. He had become bald in his year and half in one of Stalin's prisons, and was limp as his legs had been frostbitten while he was creating his fresco paintings in Moscow in the 1940s and 1950s. The next day being weekend, we could in no way visit the National Gallery. So I asked him whose work he would be interested in seeing. Thus apart from Pál Pátzay, whose statue of Lenin was on our way in Dózsa György út, next to Felvonulási tér (Rally Square), he mentioned Zoltán Olcsai Kiss, his Paris acquaintance. Looking for his works - and perhaps also led by some intuition, too - we found ourselves in the cemetery in Kerepesi út. He was overcome by the spectacle there, and I felt this was where he wanted to return finally. Perhaps this was when he decided that he would repatriate.