Gyergyádesz László, ifj.: Kecskemét és a magyar zsidó képzőművészet a 20. század első felében (Kecskemét, 2014)
Jegyzetek
ner in the background. A sweeping change can be detected in the art of Farkas around 1930. His art became a kind of escape from the incomprehensible and unacceptable world. He painted his masterpieces after 1930 which are best characterized by Jenő Nyi- las-Kolb who was his first Hungarian biographer: “Life is dark and depressing in his works. [...] The painter can sense tragedy in the air and he knows that there is no help. [...] He might not be aware of the fact how deeply it is and he, himself in the pictures. And, the tragedy of the whole world.” The painting, the Young Drunk Poet with His Mother (1932, Plate 30) seemingly depicts a real world in the suburbs of a city but we can see an irrational suburban in an absurd way where there is an unauthorized border crossing between the past and the present, this world and the other-world, the living and the dead, reality and fantasy. The model of the idiotically grinning young man with a grey fur hat was the French poet, Jean Fóliáin a representative of the so called ’’impersonal poetry" and a friend of Farkas in Paris. In his poetry real and imaginary elements belong together as in the painting of Farkas. He wrote the following lines: "blood streams in the veins - the eyes see blankly -the brains work emptily". The floor-length, purple cloth of the half-dead, skull-like faced old woman with her empty pits without eyeballs together with her golden pectoral cross hanging from her neck might recall the purple cassocks of the Roman Catholic bishops in the viewers. Floating as a shadow, she is fleeting along a fence reminding of cemetery walls, a parched, bare tree and along her seemingly drunk son painted as an incorporeal silhouette. Farkas’s favoured painting technique serves the creepy and dreamy atmosphere of The Young Drunk Poet... and of other works similar to it: tempera painted thinly on wooden panel smoothly covered with plaster with its moderate colouration and immaterial effect. From the end of the 1920s, he started using a new and unusual colouration in which the white glittering grounding is transparent, moreover, in some cases it even transilluminates recalling the transparent, translucent effect of the silver-gilt enamel of the late Middle Ages. Around the Red Table (1931, Plate 29) moves a world created by Farkas. As if the 'family table’ of the childhood revived and around it in the frame of a sleepless dream there were the late members of the Wolfner family in the forms of faceless silhouettes. Another frequent motif of Farkas is the house - in this picture depicted solitarily - which is, in all probability an unconscious form of a depth-psychological projection in his painting. It seems that nobody has ever lived in the tower-like house standing in the background reminding us of railway buildings. The houses of Farkas are automatically considered to be prisons in our imagination where we hide our profound emotions and secrets from others. Therefore, they become the symbol of human souls which want to escape from their body and materiality "These things completely lose their materiality as if they lived in the unworldly nature. ...these are extended landscapes where we can see nature, things and huKádár Béla: Fiú kutyával/ Béla Kádár: Boy with a Dog (1940) mans in magical coexistence. [...] ...the painter understands beyond everyday existence another mystical world of significance, and he sounds the events of this transcendental world by the musical instruments of his figures." For the contemporary public the unusual pictorial world of Farkas was in contrast with his perfect and elegant appearance by looks and his tempered behaviour. His artworks were made in a clean, white-walled atelier which reminded some contemporaries (e.g. Andor Adorján, Zsófia Dénes) of a chemist's. André Kertész, who lived and exhibited in Paris during the same period of time, recorded the painter (picture on page 56) with his compact Leica camera in his series taken in 1932 in this extremely rigid, laboratory neatness-like, meticulous atelier The reminiscence of Frangois Gachot is worth mentioning who could also observe Farkas during work in his similarly furnished atelier of Pest: “He seemed like an obsessed scientist who is in the middle of carrying out an experiment in his laboratory, or rather like an alchemist who is trying to unfold the material itself.” On the 1st September 1939 the Second World War broke out, and in 1941 the “Third Jewish Law” 59
