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
martyr of Stalinism, and was thus regarded an expert on Soviet matters, and asked him to curate the 1968 exhibition. Attested by his letters, one of the last wishes of Uitz was to put up an exhibition in Budapest and one in Moscow. However, he complained to cultural minister Pál Ilku saying: "The activity with which comrades Pogány and Kontha are working is very good! But there is little contact with them." 31 He was worried that they would "arrange a detail show" without the monumental works. To counter this, he made photos of his General Ludd series, blew them up to 1,5x2,5 metres, mounted them on wooden boards, and demanded their display. Crushed in the grips of history and Stalinist cultural policy, the 81-year-old master not only inclined to dogmatism, but became a die-hard dogmatic, and was very difficult to get along with. In the complicated situation, my task was far from easy, having to organize meetings and trips to the country. This was how we got to Pécs, where, supported by the master of Hungarian cultural policy, György Aczél, a skilful acquisition of material for the Modern Hungarian Gallery under Éva Hárs had been going on for a decade. What the National Gallery could not specialize on, Pécs was permitted to do and was well-funded, too. We also visited Hódmezővásárhely, where, in the midst of the traditional peasant world of the Hungarian Plains, a value-preserving, characteristically modern art with new stylistic means was produced; and we went to the city of the biennials of graphic art, Miskolc, too. Accompanied by a catalogue, the Béla Uitz retrospective was opened in the ground-floor rooms of the National Gallery on October 24, 1968. 32 (111. 7) It was a major success - and deservedly that, from many respects, too. The excellent press coverage was beyond all expectations. 33 The almost and fully abstract works the master produced in Vienna, his genuinely powerful and yet unknown masterpieces made during his first Moscow trip under the influences of Russian avant-garde and icon painting and church architecture had an eye-opener effect on especially us, youths. Meant as the focal point, the etching series General Ludd (Vienna, 1923) and the blown-up photos actually explained in a didactic manner the way he used his experiments in abstract form, his return from constructivism to figuration and agitprop 6. Béla Uitz: Analysis, 1921-22. HNG 7. Cover of the catalogue of the 1968 Uitz exhibition at the HNG subject matter. Drawn after his abstract, linearist series called Analyses (Vienna, 1921-22), his abstract compositions in colour pencil had certainly served as compositional schemes for depicting the story of the English machine breakers. (Ills. 3-5) As preliminary studies, the drawings in purple ink had contributed to this, and then followed the powerfully expressive sketches and the final zinc-plate etching that revolutionized Hungarian graphics (see István Dési Huber: 4 th Order 1928; Gyula Derkovits: Dózsa Series, 1929; Ernő Berda: No pasaran, 1939; Ferenc Redő: Antal Budai Nagy, 1939; Miklós Barna: From the History of the Hungarian Revolutionary Working-Class Movement; Károly Háy: For One Homeland Between Two Pagans, 1941^42). The period around 1960 saw the flowering of graphics freeing themselves from the constraints of socialist realism. Already in 1956, the diploma work of Béla Kondor 34 had drawn on the graphic tradition begun by General Ludd, but, while Uitz had turned back from creating new form to historical, ideological "Tendenzkunst", Kondor went exactly in the opposite direction with his Dózsa series. Uitz's graphic works meant a genuine rediscovery, while his earlier monumental ism dovetailed with the period demand for murals embodying the ideal of a collectivist, community art. All this surprised the public; the leaders of cultural life praised the exhibition; journalists and art-critics wrote enthusiastically in both the daily press and professional magazines; and visitors made their pilgrimage to the National Gallery until the end of the year. Thus the beginner artists of the new avant-garde could meet a master of the classical avant-garde and a part of his works in Budapest. I was particularly sorry that the works made in the 191 Os in Hungary were not exhibited together with the ones brought