Gyergyádesz László, ifj.: Kecskemét és a magyar zsidó képzőművészet a 20. század első felében (Kecskemét, 2014)

Jegyzetek

was put in force. Farkas had to dismiss some of the Jewish employees from the company... “Under the well organised surface of the minds and society chaotic depths opened. Never before did any darker or more pernicious tensions frustrate the imagination of poets and artists. In recent Hungarian art the pictures of István Farkas bear the marks of infernal enchantment. They take the shape of a bizarre compound of far recollections and dreams. We can see things that recall everyday reality, but through a fantastical, shocking depiction.” During the last creative period of Farkas new masterpieces were made After a long time he started using oil again, however, not on canvas, but henceforward on panel. Moreover, he also applied the paint similarly to tempera thinly and mostly with quick and wide brushstrokes. The figures are almost the same (although as they have grown old) as certain makings and motifs (umbrella, letter, ‘individual’ huge glowed hands, looks with empty pits, leafless trees, house, black dog). The unsmiling ghost-like figures in a startlingly empty setting appear as the live memories - rather adhering to the past hoping or searching for no future - of the decaying world. The line of the individual and communal fate was combined for István Farkas. Is there a point in living? The End (Grandmother and her Grandchild, 1941, Plate 28) and his other contemporary pictures are fairly pessimistic responses.

Farkas was warned before the German occupation of Hungary on the 19th March 1944, however he did not intend to run away. When on the 15th April the secretary-general of the chamber of press gave 54 Jewish journalists out to the Germans he was listed among them owing to the person who got the publishing house in return. “Farkas from the relocation camp of Sip Street got to the internment camp of Kistarcsa, and from there out of pure malice to Gödöllő and then to Kecskemét.” Ferenc Herczeg belatedly asked for the help of Miklós Horthy, Royal Governor, therefore, regrettably one of the most significant and puzzling artists of the 20th century Hungarian painting wrote his last lines from the relocation camp in Kecskemét - this is one of his connections to Kecskemét - on the 23rd June 1944 before he was going to be hauled to Auschwitz: “If a human being is so deeply humiliated it is not worth living any longer". “One of our relatives told us who had come back from Auschwitz that my father already got ill and let himself go in the train. When they arrived at the camp he had already been crushed. They warned him to lie that he was under fifty, but he admitted that he was fifty-seven years old. He was instantly

taken to the gas chamber."

We definitely have to commemorate Ida Koh- ner (1895-1945) who got acquainted with István Farkas (a cousin of her mother) at the atelier of Adolf Fényes in 1923, and married him the following year. Her father Baron Adolf Kohner was a landowner and a banker. “Many useful movements of the Jewish life are linked to his name. He was the leader of the Hungarian Jews on congressional grounds as the president of the Israelite National Office. He was also a member of the National Hungarian Jewish Fund and of the directing board of the Ferenc József College of Rabbinical Studies.” Above all, he was also an important art collector of the era (he mainly collected modern French impressionists and post-impressionists, and he possessed the Lark by Pál Szinyei Merse as well), and one of the founders of the artists' colony of Szolnok. As a result, Ida Kohner through his father soon came into contact with art and studied in Szolnok and later at the College of Fine Art. She already had an exhibition at the Ernst Museum in 1923, but she moved to Paris in November the following year together with her newly wedded husband. Although her copper etching series consisting of 12 sheets titled Russian Ballet was published in 1925 she could not avoid her fate. Their three children were born (Farkas Károly Judit and Pál), the wolf-cubs, and as we know from various reminiscences, her creative activity was pushed into the background not just because of her motherhood, but the depressing artistic burden of her husband. In spite of these circumstances the collection preserves several of her drawings, aquarelles from this period where besides the world of a village yard, chiefly her children are portrayed (Plate 26). Unfortunately, soon after the death of her husband she was shot dead by Arrow-Cross men under unsolved circumstances up to the present.

Although the chapter heading is about painting we are able to discuss a sculpture as well in the frame of this selection. Its sculptor is Dezső Bokros Birman (1889-1965) who was one of the most original masters of the 20th century Hungarian sculptural art. He was born in a poor; religious Jewish family of 11 children in Újpest originating from Northern Hungary (Nővé mesto nad Váhom). He suffered discrimination several times during his life. “I am a marked man.” - he said to Kassák in 1944 (he was tried by the forced-labour service) on the occasion of showing him a new sculpture. “I think those people might be right who want to destroy my kind. Always work; always want to create something new, something

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