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

The last, single-year period of Vajda's art, 1940, was both a summit and a closing chord, He produced large-scale drawings in charcoal on wrapping paper. The immediate antecedents of their fibrous shapes suggestive of vegetable matter seem to be motifs woven from close-set ink lines which look like petals and tongues of flame, but dynamically moving structures had engrossed his attention already in the speckling of the early drawings or the particles of colour in Icon Self-portrait Pointing Upward. Clearly, he was drawn to the elemental structures of nature; according to the recollections of Piroska Szántó, he found the broken pieces of puffballs thrilling and inspiring. But facing the raw material and energy of life and existence, struggle, must have been the most important fact for him. In this struggle, after history and culture, not even space and time counted. What was left is the black and white, flickering and serpentine, intertwined web of form. Unintentionally, this "stripping" reductionist procedure is re-filled with passion and suffering, the tribulations of individual and communal life. The awareness of his disease, the possibility of premature death, the struggle to leave a worthy sign behind had accompanied him throughout his career. We are bound to think that there is a premonition in these pictures of the imminent flare-up of his tuberculosis. But we can also sense the horror of war-faring Europe, the crisis of a culture mocking its own humanist tradition. It cannot be accidental that ill-omened images of demonic masks, deep-sea leviathans, glaring-eyed primeval animals and threatening warriors unfold from these figures flitting with ostensible whimsicality. No doubt, one of the important factors contributing to the effect of these pictures on the receiver is fear, the horror of culture falling apart and the hopelessness of personal future, an elementally powerful conveying of tragedy. All this is important but not exclusive. I believe that rendering perceptible the elemental character of shapes being born and moving is a similarly significant component of these drawings. These drawings start out from a sort of artistic ground zero, and refer back to the primary, original moment of the birth of form through the flaring up of flame and the shades appearing on the wall of the cave. The rhythm and timing of the whirling and curving shapes have an important function. Tracking the current, the knotting and undulation of unfolding shapes, we might set out on a voyage of discovery: we can have a glimpse of the birth, growth and death of the forces of nature, of metamorphoses in the Goetheian sense of the word: "What is nature? She is power that devours power; nothing is present, all is transient, a myriad of buds trampled under foot, a myriad of buds coming to life every moment; grandiosity and significance, infinite diversity, beauty and ugliness, goodness and evil, everything has the same right to exist one by the other," wrote the German polyhistor. It should be remembered that Vajda was aware of the concept of bio-romanticism the only Hungarian art critic he had any esteem for, Ernő Kállai, formulated: the theory of the "hidden face of nature", in which he compared micro- and macrocosmic structures with the basic elements of non-figurative and surrealistic art. The combined presence of these two, hardly separable factors makes these pictures be particularly significant, unforgettable, the elementally powerful messengers of life and death, the first and last words in his art. XI, The Last Drawings in Charcoal