Veszprémi Nóra - Szücs György szerk.: Vajda Lajos (1908–1941) kiállítása (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2008/6)

Gábor Pataki: Panther and Lily: The Retrospective of Lajos Vajda

barge. In an essay, Ilka Gedő spoke of "Biblical objects", a simple material world that survived the storms of history. This observation is true only for a part of them, since the tin corpus, the garland-like handle of a pump, the skull seen on the tombstones of the Serbian cemetery in Szentendre have a "style" of their own, an age determinable historically even in their very simplicity. It might be better to speak of the elements of a traditional, organic form of life and existence in relation to them. It was to these motifs, fragmentary as they were, that Vajda and Korniss reverted to in the "Szentendre programme" they propounded in a writing published in 1936; by their means, they sought to look forward. In order to do so, they had to find a suitable method, because, however important the elements in themselves were, they could only be used to create a world picture if organically knit together. Vajda's method might be called: "transparent montage". It is a combination of two procedures he had already deployed successfully, the line drawing by a sure hand and the montage technique of his collages; it is the attempt to see "the effect of various objects removed from their different environments and fixed together in the plane of the picture." The constructive element of the method he called "constructive surrealist thematics" was based on the accuracy and discipline of "fixing together" and on the effect of surrealist association. And these both were founded on a rejection and surpassing of central perspective and simultaneously the realistic tradition of Hungarian art. Succinctly, Gábor Karátson called this "extended perspective". In his drawings and the paintings in tempera he made using them, Vajda attempted to render the psychic and historical dimensions of space perceptible, to express the co-relatedness of man and world. In the most mature pieces in the series, such as Szentendre Houses with Crucifix, the vertical-horizontal arrangement has therefore no particular role: motifs blending into one another float and wheel freely in a sky-blue space. At the same time, Vajda was engrossed in yet another fundamental question: that of the representation of human form. After the role-playing self-portraits of his youth, he sought to create a portraiture, self-portraiture, that was both individual and communitarian, both worldly and transcendent, both asserting his own individual artistic fate and elevating it into the cohesion of all mankind. Deriving from 19

lh-century artist myths sacralizing the creative individual and reinforced by an Avant-Garde sense of mission, this conception found an important starting point and ideological support in icons, which he turned to with a natural inquisitiveness and impulse also due to his stay in Serbia in his youth. On the basis of is personal experiences and his exhaustive readings in the field, he viewed icon paint"...we want to be bridge builders" "...the age of earthly monasticism comes again and again" VI. The Szentendre Programme VII, Vajda and Icons