A Herman Ottó Múzeum évkönyve 48. (2009)

Szabó Lilla: „Külön világban és külön időben" (Az Amerikában élő magyar képzőművészek és művészetük. A hivatalos magyar állásfoglalás az Amerikában élő magyar képzőművészekről)

Curiously enough, Mihály Munkácsy's decorative, richly coloured paintings of bourgeois salon interiors and idylls too were retroactively relegated to this "different time". Official Socialist art history deemed Munkácsy's paintings sold in the United States by Charles Sedermayer, his art dealer, as reflecting a "petit bourgeois and bourgeois attitudes" - these paintings were contrasted with works such as the Yawning Apprentice, the Condemned Ceil (The Convict), the Pawnshop and the Tramps at Night, portraying the "working class". Despite the seeming conflict between the experimentation characterising avantgárdé art and Socialist ideology, the history of Hungarian avantgárdé art has been studied in much greater depth than the art of the artists living in the United States whose oeuvre followed traditional directions. The reason for this should be sought in the fact that Hungarian art historians (Éva Bajkay, Lenke Haulish, Júlia Szabó, Olivér Botár, Éva Forgács) began to examine the international context of the Hungarian avantgárdé, alongside the importance and key role played by Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy and others, such as Anna Lesznai. The artists who had emigrated to the United State before World War 2 and those who fled Fascism were judged more mildly by officialdom than those who had left the country in 1956 of their own accord or as "criminals". Official policy drew a very sharp distinction between the different types of emigration. The image of an enemy served to imprint the image of Socialism as a positive system. Following the crush of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, extremely harsh and false accusations were levelled against the Hungarian emigration. The émigrés were branded with demagogical charges. A separate section of the paper is devoted to József Dómján, his reception in Hungary and the duality of the reception of his oeuvre. Another section focuses on Lajos Szalay, the outstanding graphic artist of the emigration and compares his life and art to that of Koloman Sokol, a Slovakian artist. The paper is rounded up by an overview of the reception in Hungary of the Hungarian artists who had emigrated to the United States in 1956. "Homage to the motherland". Exhibition, December 1982-February 1983 "In a world and time apart". International conference on 20th century Hungarian art from 1918 to the present and the accompanying volume of conference papers. The author has devoted several studies to the issues discussed in this paper. She read a paper, "Art in support of and in conflict with political power", at the International Congress of Hungarian Studies held in Jyväskylä in 2001, whose theme was "Power and Culture". Lilla Szabó