Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1955. január-június (4. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)
1955-01-06 / 1. szám
Gellert’s Drawings: Powerful Weapons in the Fight for Freedom, for the Rights of Labor, for the American Democratic Heritage 4 Heroes of American democracy: Lincoln, Frederick Douglass Walt Whitman, Harriet Tubman, Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson Outstanding world renowned artists, such as Anton Re- fregiei, Charles White, Paul Robeson of U. S., Diego Rivera of Mexico^ Ishigaki of Japan, writers such as Howard Fast, Michael Gold head a group sponsoring the celebration of Hugo Gellert’s 40th Anniversary as an artist. Banquets will be held in New York on Sunday, January 16th, 3 P. M. in the Hungarian Hall, 2141 Southern Blvd., in Cleveland on Sunday, January 23, 1. P. M. at Hungarian Hall 11123 Buckeye Road; in Los Angeles, January 30, 2 P. M. at Hungarian Home 1251 S. St. Andrews PI.; Chicago, February J3, and Detroit, Saturday 19, 8 P. M. at the Petőfi Club 8124 Burdeno, Detroit. ★ FORTY years ago Hugo Gellert who was then a shy, skinny lad in his teens working in a machine-shop stole away from his lathe to draw a May Day cartoon for a working-class newspaper. The son of an Hungarian tailor who migrated to Yorkville, he is now an artist whose works are known'in all the galleries of. the world. This eminent artist cannot isolate his gift from the working-class that gave him birth. Long ago he decided that great art spripgs from great love for humanity; he has tried, in cartoon, in painting, in book and on the walls of buildings where he has drawn his brilliant murals, to declare his abiding confidence in man’s triumph For a generation his drawings have adorn . the pages of publications like the old Masses, the Hungarian newspaper Előre, the Liberator, the New Masses. He never faltered on his long road. Hugo Gellert came out of the tailor’s home at the age of fourteen when he got his working-papers to find a job at a lathe. He had decided to study mechanical drawing at night school but when be heard the youngster in the line before him register for “free-hand drawing” he suddenly made a decision that changed his life. The working-class boy who had planned to spend his years at a drawing board designing machines became an artist designing the future of man. All humanity became the model for free-hand drawing. -He got down on paper and on stone the grandeur of the class that works the machines he once planned to draw. You saw it in his pages of the old Masses, the Liberator, the New Masses, you saw it in his four books, like Marx’ “Capital in Lithograps,” where he tried to capture the innermost truths of our life. With a grand and defiant hand he put those truths on walls in his murals at Rockfeller Center that hang to this day' decipting a worker’s child reaching for the stars. The modesty of this man who speaks in a voice so low that you must often lean forward to hear his words conceals a flaming imagination that can soar to the skies. Thp artist who searches for truth everywhere is frank with his own life. He did not always see his art as a sword for justice: “I was not immune in my earlier years from the prevalent concept that it can’t be art if it deals with the strife and troubles of our day.” He did not see then as' se sees now and he has seen for many decades that the cartoon which can reach and move thousands, millions, can. be art. I learned that art need not be expressed in oils and in painting alone: it can live on the pages of newspapeis that are fighting mankind’s fight.” He came to that conclusion in his early years and his life has fortified it. He held it all during the years that he drew for the Socialist Call, for Pulitzer’s World, for the New Yorker magazine. ★ I am one of many who remember his drawings on the wTalls of that big working’-class restaurant on Union Square in the late Twenties and I reminded him of it. The story he told is characteristic of the man. The metropolitan newspapers had commented on the mural and one day Wallace Harrjson, an architect of Rockefeller Center, drove drown in his limousine for a look. The architect told the story afterward, making a humorous tale of it, how he marched into the worker’s restaurant that winter day in a great overcoat and a fur collar. A workingman glanced up at him and muttered, “The s.o.b.’s won’t leave us alone even down here.” Harrison was on the lookout for talent wherever he found it, (these were days when McCarthy was still in knee- pants) and the architect asked Hugo to draw murals for the Plaza. Hugo agreed and characteristically he demanded his right to speak his mind. Gellért put Negro and white workers, mén with sledge(Continued on page 12) January 6, 1955 AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ REVIEW OF THE MONTH Progressives honora great artist: Gellert _____li i “Labor, the Mightiest Force in an Industrial Society”
