Fery Veronika szerk.: Fery Antal élete, munkássága, alkotásainak jegyzéke (Miskolc, 2005)

The life and work of Antal Fery by Dr. Imre Soós

The life and work of Antal Fery by Dr. Imre Soós Antal Fery was a creator of style in Hungarian graphic art of the 20th century, in particular ex libris art, and this book pays tribute to his prodigious oeuvre. To get acquainted with an artist's work it is essential to know something about his creative personality, his concept of the world and his career, so let us look at the life of Antal Fery and the various stages of his career in the hope that this will take the reader nearer to the artist who won international recognition in the field of small prints and whose contemporaries claimed "He had only friends". Antal Fery was born on June 12 1908 in the historic town of Szerencs in the north-east of Hungary. With a scholarship from the local Sugar Factory established in 1889 he began his art studies at the School for Applied Arts in Budapest. Under the guidance of Professor Lajos Nándor Varga, he gained his diploma in graphic art in 1935. He was always drawn to making woodcuts. The process for this is similar to the generally used rubber-stamp on which the letters and numbers stand out from the surface. These in turn are painted by the inking pad. For woodcuts you need well seasoned hard wood, the most suitable being box or pear. After sketching a draft on the smoothly planed piece of wood known as a printing block, the artist cuts away the planned picture or text, or, to be more exact, its mirror image. Once the protuberant surface has been painted, you can print the actual picture onto a sheet of paper. With this process Antal Fery mainly produced ex libris and prints for special occasions. The function of the ex libris is well-known: after all, these small-sized prints have been used to mark a book's owner for centuries. Over the past hundred years, however, less and less of them have been pasted into books. The ex libris started a life of its own: graphic art enthusiasts began to collect each other's ex libris, swapping them and buying and selling them. For a time collecting spread to prints for occasions, Christmas and New Year cards, wedding invitations, etc. The techniques became increasingly diverse. Apart from woodcuts, linocuts, etchings, engravings and lithographs became popular. The collecting of small prints spread all over Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Here in Hungary, between the two world wars, two associations of collectors were in operation. Antal Fery made his first small prints in 1939. By the time he had worked himself into the genre the second world war had