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

3. Béla Uitz: Geometrical study for "Kapitän von Nottingham, " 1923. HNG 4. Béla Uitz: Sketch for "Kapitän von Nottingham, " 1923. HNG cally. Thus official cultural policy slowly began to be open to acknowledging modernism, which had been rejected until the end of the 1950s; the precedents for this were provided by agitprop art and posters of the period between 1917 and 1919. The publication of Imre Bori's and Eva Körner's Kassák irodalma és festészete (The Literature and Painting of Kassák) in 1967 had the effect of a revelation. In 1968, the death of Kassák a year earlier occasioned new exhibitions in Székesfehérvár: the Lajos Kassák Memorial Exhibition and the Hommage á Kassák were arranged with the participation of constructivist-minded young artists, such as Imre Bak, Tamás Hencze, János Fajó and associates from Hungary and Lucien Hervé, Jifi Koláf, Rosie Rey from elsewhere.

23 At the same time, the yet unknown post-1919 oeuvre of Béla Uitz seemed multiply topical. The Western rediscovery of Kassák may have also contributed to this, for his brother-in-law, Uitz, had had an important role in the modernist aspirations of the 191 Os and 1920s. It may have dawned on Uitz that, in the period of the "soft dictatorship", he no longer had to fear being excluded on grounds of "formalism" or the trumped-up charges of espionage against émigrés who returned home. So come he could, but his arrival was laden with tense expectations, and he himself had no clear view of art life any longer. It is a noteworthy fact that Uitz's emigration material in Soviet collections and the possession of the artist was exhibited at the National Gallery at the same time as the New Avant-Garde made its first collective debut in the building of architectural office Iparterv at the end of 1968.

24 In his own way, the director general of the National Gallery was open, too;

25 especially with regard to Hungarians living in neighbouring countries: on the influence of Deputy Director István Solymár, the Transylvanian artist Béla Gy. Szabó had a one-man show and bequeathed a large number of his works to the Gallery; while material was selected from the estate of Bertalan Pór in Slovak possession for his major retrospective, and the huge body of his artworks were deposited for safeguarding in the Gallery.

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1 This was also a result of the fact that foreign relations were construed at the time to primarily focus on the socialist countries, especially the Soviet Union. Hungarian exhibitions were arranged in Moscow almost annually,

27 thus organizing Uitz's show would entail no particular difficulty. His works made in Vienna and Paris had to be brought home not from the West, but from the Soviet Union, as he had taken them with himself through all the stations of his emigration. Westerners began to develop an interest in East European avant-garde at this time.

28 And in Hungary, too, it was the forgotten Hungarian avant-gardiste whose homecoming was eagerly expected, especially by the younger generation.

29 In 1967, Corvina Publishers brought out a representative Uitz Album, hallmarked by Ferenc Münnich, notably prime-minister since 1957, who wrote the introduction.

30 To prepare the volume, Anna Oelmacher, head of the Department of Prints and Drawings of the National Gallery, and later the art historian Éva Korner and a photographer had visited the old master in his Moscow studio, and tried to select the material for the book. Pogány then went to art historian Sándor Kontha, who had written a monograph on the sculptor László Mészáros, Uitz's colleague in Kyrgyzstan and a 5. "Kapitän von Nottingham. " Sheet from Uitz's series of etchings GeneralLudd, 1923. HNG