A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1987 (Debrecen, 1988)

Holló László Kossuth-díjas festőművész születése 100. évfordulója alkalmából a Déri Múzeumban rendezett Emlékülés 1987. március 5. - Bíró Katalin: A few Remarks about the Self-Portraits of Holló László

Katalin Bíró A^FEW REMARKS UPON THE SELF-PORTRAITS OF HOLLÓ LÁSZLÓ The starting point of the contributor is a widely read statement in the studies on Holló László's art, that is, the series of his self-portraits are unparallelled in Hungarian painting and they represent the best part of his oeuvre. The contributor establishes that the question of what values Hollo's self-portrait painting represents within his own life-work or in the Hungarian fine arts in the first half of our century could be only answered on the basis of manyfolded iconographic, typological, stylistic examinations, also referring on precise biographic data and adapting the results of widespread comparative analyses. In the present contribution the outlined theme is approached by focussing on the formation of the oeuvre and of the individual style. On the basis of the oeuvre catalogue Holló László painted 212 oil self-portraits between 1910 and 1974. First, just as in a statistical review, the distribution of the pieces of work throughout the more than sixty years is surveyed. Then the so gained pieces of information are compared to the biographic data and to the facts of the stylistic formation of the oeuvre, so that these could give some explanation for the waving movements of the distribution. As a result, definite correspondences appear. Next a comparison follows between Holló László's portrait painting and the self-portraits pointing out that the major part of the portraits taking a transitional position towards one or two figured genres emphasizing the typical marking features of the persons and their fates rather than their individual characteristic features, Holló László was not a portrait-painter in fact. Attention is also drawn to the scheme of presentment, establishing that both the posture and the cutting follows the simplest forms, the environment is signed in very few cases and it very rarely happened that the artist presented himself in a role. The emphasis is laid on the expression of the face, on the hold of the head and on the carriage. The attention is focussed on the personality, on the state of mind, on the painting method directly presenting the character and all these increase the expressiveness of expression of works, corresponding to the expressionistic features of the painter's style. In Hollo's selfportraits the characterising abilities of the lightening, the colours and the way the painter moved his brush on the canvas, the brush-traces, the calligraphy work so as to represent directly the character and the state of mood. These features are characteristic of the expressionistic style which developped consequently in the life-work of the painter and, which at the same time shows his self-portrait painting in fact unparallelled in the Hungarian painting of his age, though the tendency, itself, of painting a series of autoportraits throughout of their lives was not a unique phenomenon in the oeuvres of the Hungarian artists in the first half of our century. 439