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

Jegyzetek

ate.” In some of his compositions the blue colour becomes white as the obvious sign of mourning. (According to János Kőbányai, the usage and the function of the colour white probably derive from a white burial cloth which is given to “Jewish men on their wedding day, and they wear it once a year on the occasion of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and at their own funeral.”) The most shocking of his portraits is the Self Portrait on the Catafalque (page 31) in the possession of the Hungarian National Gallery which was painted after the perhaps most brutal period in Ukraine (18th March 1942 - 29th June 1943) of the forced-labour service. “It is a warning that there will not be anybody to record as he did at the death of Lajos Vajda in 1941Understandably he made most of his graphic works in this period which include several self portraits. Unfortunately, the justification of the clock - in the frame of Ámos’s motifs - appearing in the ink drawing (page 61) made in 1941 and displayed at our exhibition was given by destiny in 1944 when the time of the apocalypse came. In the autumn 1944, his military company was ordered to a lager in Saxony (Ohrdruf) where he was possibly shot dead.

Margit Anna (originally, Sicherman, then Margit Sólyom, 1913-1991) got to know Ámos, who studied at the college of Budapest, at the art school of János Vaszary at the graphic atelier of the OMIKE (National Hungarian Israelite Educational Society). Although they almost immediately shacked up with each other (they spent the summer separately because of financial concerns Ámos in Nagykálló and Margit Anna near Gyula), they married only in 1936. “Margit Anna remembers that she had only one dress, but the chairwoman of the OMIKE presented her with a black and white spotted dress: this was her wedding dress. And, their wedding meal was bean soup and poppy seed pasta at the canteen of the OMIKE.” Despite the early influence of Ámos, Jewish topics only emerged in her art from the end of the 1960s. The most typical genre of her early period, and even her whole oeuvre was the self portrait, and Its impersonating variations. By means of the Farkas-Glücks collection we took possession of the Head Wrapped in a Shawl (Plate 35) which is one of the best examples of the more and more vivid painting technique of Margit Anna having appeared in her art at the beginning of the 1940s (thickly applied tempera, sharp colour contrasts). The wide, stylized, masque-like face of the painter (cruel self-irony?) and its disproportionately large eyes - hiding and covering her defencelessness with virtual resignation - are all the reflections of

the meaningless suffering of her husband during his forced-labour service. In contrast to Ámos, she did everything to survive as she could never put up with the fact that her husband was the victim of the Holocaust. Although she could not hope on the basis of the news from other fellow artists she was steadily waiting for him to return home for two years. Between 1945 and 1948, she was a member of the leading group, the European School, which wanted to guide the Hungarian artistic life to modern Europe, and she participated in its exhibitions. Therefore, it is not surprising that Margit Anna is accentuated in one of the standard works of this group, in the volume titled the Revolution in Art published in 1947, in the same year when her aquarelle preserved in Kecskemét was painted (Head, Plate 36). “She Is the only painter, who can seriously be characterized by the attribute, primitive. [...] With her empty, circle head and triangular body she wants to be dissolved in her own prototype. [...] The woman with an uncertain look, while secluding herself from seeing, automatically and ghostly returns. There is something frightened, threatening and spooky in every appearance of her like on the churinga or on Mexican puppets.”

Pirogránit tetődísz a Cifrapalotán /

A pyrogranite finial on the Cifrapalota (1903)

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