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

from 1937, they would not work together, and though young artists (Endre Bálint, Piroska Szántó) slowly began to circle around Vajda, they could not make up for the loss of the intensive co-operation. From then on, Vajda no longer believed in the possibility of creating a truly efficient community or group. Due to the Soviet show trials, he came to the conclusion that there was no hope in socialism and the Avant-Garde utópia. He began to attribute more and more significance to instinctual, individual characteristics: "I have no interest in 'objective truth' [,..] I am happy to bear the odium of being 'un-scientific' and 'self-conceited', I dare be 'subjective,'" he wrote. This change of heart can be discerned in his artistic method, too. The strictly lyrical logic of the "transparent montages" disintegrated, the balance of "constructive" and "surrealistic" motifs tipped towards the latter. The figure of a little boy appearing in an oil lamp, the wrinkled face of a goblin, an awkward lamb off a splash-guard, a willow, a beaky bird with empty eyeholes have a mysterious mood in themselves. The sense of uncertainty is redoubled by the fragmentariness and mutability of the motifs: the drawings often as not depict mere stubs and splinters. The system of clear running lines began to be replaced. The newer works had thick lines in charcoal, creating a complicated chain of emphasis and subordination. In this respect, it is worth comparing two Christ portraits. In the 1936 Tin Christ, the motifs retain their individual characteristics, equality. In the 1937 Drawing Montage with Black-face Christ Figure, the varying thickness of the lines create primary and secondary stresses, the motifs become fragmentary, the relations of elements of composition become puzzling and ambiguous. This can be observed in other groups of his works. The stubs of limbs, heads of horses, knotty drapery bundles loose their enclosedness, their stable place in the structure of the artwork, the relation between their positions becomes unstable. The solid system created by the "Szentendre programme" disintegrated, and the system of motifs was gradually replaced and transformed; the individual elements went through a clearly visible individuation, and bore psychic contents never before experienced. It clearly dawned on Vajda: the world could not be incorporated in Szentendre. From 1938, Szentendre disappeared from the art of Vajda. Its was substituted by places unidentifiable; just as the self-portraits and portraits, the Christs and Madonnas were replaced by sometimes grinning, sometimes snarling, but always fearful and peculiar masks or masks combined with beings. Vajda had always been drawn to masks and the art of tribal cultures. We know that his favourite museum in Paris was not the Louvre but the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (what was later to be called the Musée de l'Homme) with its unparalleled ethnographic collection, that his library and readings included several works in the field, and he also probably saw the rather rich collection of Oceanian material of the Budapest Museum of Ethnography. A direct influence, however, is only apparent in a handful of works (e.g. Mask with Inner Landscape). The masks of the collections and books were more of a starting point, a source of transcendent aspects for him. IX, Masks