Mészáros Júlia, N.: 35 éves a Győri Művésztelep. Történeti áttekintés, művek, életrajzi adatok, beszámoló a jubileumi találkozóról - Győri művészettörténet 4. (Győr, 2003)

Wehner Tibor: "A győri példa"

TIBOR WEHNER: „AN EXAMPLE FROM GYŐR”

In October of 1980, Anna Vadász, the head of Department of Cultural Affairs of the City Council of Győr stated, looking back on history of the Artists’ Symposium of Győr, ’The summer workshop established in 1969 and housed at the Teacher Training Institute received the invited panel painters of Transdanubia, then Budapest - above all the twin district, Pesterzsébet - in its first ten years.

On the proposal and with the help of the Committee of the City of Győr of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, the number of the Symposium’s members increased by applied artists recognized as kinetic sculptors. The objective was to express our city’s industrial character in the work of the symposium, the artistic activity, and to decorate the city’s public sites with the creations.”

Although such excellent artists recognized as kinetic sculptors like Zoltán Bohus, Tibor Csiky, István Haraszty and Mária Lugossy worked in Győr, the maintainers and ideological guards of the artists’ symposium soon expressed their discontent. According to Anna Vadász’s report „The plan for the activity of this so-called RÁBA Group - which received considerable help with its work from the party and economic leaders of the RÁBA Hungarian Carriage and Waggon Works - miscarried”.

The mobiles and objects made during their three-year operation - as the official jury stated - had not reached the proper professional standard but remained in the stage of experimentation with material and form. That is why the resolution of the Executive Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party of the City of Győr made in October of 1978 was justified, saying that it is necessary to delimit the profile of the artists’ symposium unambiguously, to create its national rank, to connect its activity to the realization of the objective of urban policy and art.” Official art - and first of all art policy -even in the second half of the seventies, the period of the more and more weakening requirement of Socialist Realism, hardly elaborated the ambitions and creations born in the spirit of ambitions dealing exclusively with artistic problems. In the background of aesthetic questions put they thought they discovered hostile ideology, an attack against official art. Although - as it was also proved so convincingly by the early works of the sculptural collection of exhibition paraded by the Municipal Museum of Art, looking back on history of the artists’ symposium - Tibor Csiky’s wooden sculpture Identical Forms, Zoltán Bohus’s Sliding Track, Ádám Misch and Antal Lux’s Object and János Fajó’s Plane Sculpture enriched the harvest of the artists’ symposium as representatives of creation reduced only to minimal, geometric basic forms, artistic summaries resembling kernel sentences, at the same time as works making maximal use of the possibilities of industrial execution. This harvest as well as the mentality represented by the works necessarily conflicted, however, with the ideals of the local (and central) ideologists expecting rigid sculptural conventions.

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