Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

Bom on September 15, 1916 in Tapolca, Nagy’s drawing abilities were already noted when he was at school. He developed his talents further at the College of Applied Art in Budapest. Although there were two prominent stamp designers among his teachers, Jenő Haranghy and Ferenc Helbing, he was unable to decide for some time whether to go in for graphics, painting or sculpture. He was in his fourth year at college when he came first in a competition in 1938 to design an imaginary stamp. Nagy was recommended when Endre Horváth, head of the design department at the Banknote Press, when to the college in search of staff. He joined as a designer in 1940.

There he joined an illustrious team headed by Horváth: Nagy, József Vertei, Mihály Füle, Ferenc Gál and László Kékesi. Their collective artistic talents were joined by conscious friendship and human cohesion. This allowed them to develop a uniform, high- standard appearance for Hungarian stamp design.

As Nagy put it when awarded the Munkácsy Prize in 1954, ‘Hungarian stamps should not just be labels for franking, but artistic creations of an internationally high standard.’ This was his objective as head of the design department and later artistic director. He attained it in the 207 stamps he designed and in the seminal influence he exerted on Hungarian stamp design as a whole. His style, techniques and artistic standards became the measure for stamp design and stamp issues for decades.

Though Zoltán Nagy died ten years ago, he remains with us for as long as his works are admired, in exhibitions and in the albums of collectors. We continue to meet him regularly.

Gabriella Nikodém: Birthday display for János Kass

The Stamp Museum’s display to mark the 70th birthday of designer János Kass was unusual for being centred on the artist rather than the art. The choice fell expressly of graphics and stamp designs that visitors could not have seen elsewhere.

Kass invests all his work with a special content. This includes the stamps he has been designing since 1973. His solutions, his specific artistic traits and his way of seeing things almost add up to a separate aesthetic category.

His art is a poetry of lines that are bold, sure and energetic. Paradoxically, their simplicity is what allows them to impart the most intricate ideas, whole philosophical systems, and complex, equivocal feelings.

Kass conveys these messages with an extraordinary diversity. He does graphics, paints pictures, illustrates books, constructs sculptures and figures, makes animated films, takes photographs, and writes verses and studies. These are the manifestations and responses of an enquiring Renaissance mind, uniquely possible and perfect expressions. We cannot be grateful enough that stamps, as small graphic designs, should have featured among the forms of expression he chose. That means his art is not just available to a favoured few initiates, but a treasure to be shared by everyone.

In mounting the exhibition, we wished many more peaceful, healthy years of unbroken creativity to one who has reached the highest international peaks as an artist without ever seeking to promote himself. Creation is an instinct to him, an inner compulsion, a calling, by which he transmits deeper thoughts, purer feelings, and a morality higher than usual in dimensions tied to the material plane.

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