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
ing not merely as an exotic-sacrificial speciality, but as a means of grasping and representing a superior reality. He also attempted to apply this methodologically and iconographically strictly regulated mode of artistic creation to profane subjects matter. This was what led Vajda to produce his 1936 series of artworks, in which, making certain use of the tradition of glass icons, putting coloured surfaces within thick contours, he represented a market scene and figures with melon heads (nitwits). For all their simple-sentence phrasing, elementalness, the pictures drew heavily on European and even Hungarian Romantic painterly traditions with their brown, earth colours and gluey strokes of brush. The real challenge was how far an image showing both divine and human aspects could be created. As demonstrated by the list of his readings, Vajda was well aware of the complexity and significance of the problem of the icon throughout Byzantine-Orthodox theology, its power in "theosis, the divinization of human nature" (Uspensky). Somewhat mechanically, he tried to make a synthesis of the icon and the self-portrait (Icon Self-Portrait, Self-Portrait with Olive Branch) - coming rather close to the identification of artist and the suffering/triumphant Christ so popular from the second half of the 19 th century. In other attempts, he sought to connect the blocklike enclosedness of an icon with a plastically vivid surface formation (Plastic Head, Icon). His aspirations were fulfilled in Icon Self-portrait Pointing Upward (Conditio Humana). The picture allows for several interpretations, but we can no doubt differentiate between the clearly recognizable, individual self-portrait and a generalized, icon-like one, which were projected on to one another, or, to be more exact, interpenetrate one another due to the dynamic movement of stream-like spots of paint, as well as the resulting third portrait. This trinity is by no means accidental: knowing his readings, the inseparable trinity of body, soul and mind; man, God and god-man (Berdyaev) and I, Thou and It (Buber), is arguably behind them, just as the concept of the Swiss thinker that the human face preserves the vestiges of the image of a God disappeared. This underscores the reading that the third portrait unfolding as it does from the synthesis of the first two, a sceptre face deriving from the divine and the human nature, is the "true" portrait of Vajda, the artist believing in the mission of his craft and its transcendent power. The composition, which is otherwise harmonic and suggestive of not so much his own apotheosis but that of art, its sacred and transcendent character, includes also a hand in a markedly dissonant and perturbing position. Though the upraised hand can apparently be traced back to the tradition of Christ Emmanuel in Byzantine iconography, that is the incarnate Christ who nevertheless is identified with the divine God, its hawk-like menacing character warns us of the fragility of the spiritual process, the (worldly) dangers lying in wait for it. Ikonos önarckép / Icon Self-portrait, 1936 (kat. 112.) PMMI Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre
