Bakos Katalin - Manicka Anna szerk.: Párbeszéd fekete-fehérben, Lengyel és magyar grafika 1918–1939 (MNG, Warszawa–Budapest, 2009)

III. KATALÓGUS - 1. VÁROS. TÖMEG. GÉP. A MODERNIZMUS ARCAI - - Ember a városban

of life and sensitivity to eroticism. The characterization of the most felicitously captured figures, however, also implies some critical overtone and irony, suggesting the specters of sultriness and debauchery breaking through the illusion of elegance and nonchalance. The famous Jockey bar in Paris is the theme of Gyula Zilzer's etching, which also suggests more than just the joy of rhythm, music, glamour. This duality - the intimacy with a familiar, popular milieu and its depiction with a critical tone, the admiration for the beauty of the modern age and its grotesque parody - is the source of the tension and appeal of Vértes' and Zilzer's works. An outstanding figure of Hungarian interwar art, Gyula Derkovits was deeply committed to the working class. Painting, drawing and printing had equal weight in his oeuvre. The pictures of the daily life on the outskirts, physical labour, struggles for the subsistence of oneself and the family, despair and rebellion all root in the artist's own working-class background, therefore the emotional warmth and passionate protest, compassion and sharp criticism that they imply are very intense and perfectly authentic. Derkovits lifted the theme from tangible reality through various degrees of abstraction to render it as a confession of universal validity. Unknown Soldier is a dry-point which concentrates an all-round social review owing to the montage-like manner of composition. The war cripple begging or vending in the street belonged to the post-World War I streetscape and became the symbol of disaster, decay, humiliation in the mordantly satirical prints of Georg Grosz, who was well known to Hungarian leftwing artists. In Derkovits' print the newsman wearing black glasses stands in front of a representative memorial of the heroes. The figures on horseback strongly cut by the edges of the drypoint are reminiscent of the figures of the Millenary Monument on Heroes' Square representing the chieftains of the seven Magyar tribes who conquered the country. The monument planned for the millenary celebrations of the country in 1896 proclaimed the persistence of the nation for a thousand years, the heroic figures radiating the state-creating power of the Hungarians and the authority of the estates. In Derkovits' time, the monument became the symbol of national Christian Hungary as the heir to the medieval Hungarian empire, suggesting the inviolability of the historical borders of the country. As an ironic counterpoint to the historical pathos, the ruling class of the modern age, the rich bourgeoisie appears in the car dashing past in the background. The relief on the plinth of the monument shows tied up prisoners, symbolizing the underprivileged and the outcast of capitalism in this context. Gyula Derkovits visualized the workers' protest against misery, humiliation and terrorization through the depiction of a historical event, the peasant rising led by György Dózsa in 1 514. Made in 1928-29, the series of ten large sheets is a masterpiece of the modern Hungarian woodcut. It was probably the bloody suppression of the demonstration on September 1, 1 930, that urged the artist to elaborate the theme again, now in etching. The jagged lines in the etching broadening towards the centre adapt to the ink drawings made of the demonstration. In the woodcuts the crude, solid blocks of forms, in the etchings the intricate web of lines over the entire surface was handled masterfully by Derkovits. The whirling group of demonstrators emerges from among the cobblestones in the drawings of the protest marches, while in the Dózsa cycle the unified but faceless crowd grows directly out of the ground, as it were. From the second half of the 1920s, several artistic periodicals, groups, art circles also involving amateurs were concerned with the cultural elevation of the workers. Activism turned to the cultivation of the personality after the ideals of the revolution and construction. Kassák's periodical, Dokumentum, which advocated the program of constructivism gave way to Munka. [Work] in 1 929, "a review of art and society". The intellectuals, students and young worker activists rallying around Munka emphasized enlightening, education, the creation of an intellectual-artistic workshop. The adequate genres of these efforts were the "socio-photo" (socially critical photography which combined artistic expression with documentary elements), the workers' theatre, the speech choir. The verse-reciting choirs, modern music and dance played a great role in Iván Hevesy's and Ödön Palasovszky's activity, who proclaimed the necessity of a new mass art. Aladár Tamás, editor of