Mazányi Judit szerk.: Kandó Gyula (1908–1968). A festőművész hagyatékának bemutatása. (PMMI kiadványai - Kiállítási katalógusok 5. Pest Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága, Szentendre, 2003)
Judit Mazányi Tesserae to a career In a pedagogical survey made by the Hungarian Paedology Society in 1916, we can read the following about an 8 and a half year old boy: "he is inexhaustible in physical work; as for his inclinations he is insistent and absorbed; he is interested in artistic experiences most of all; keen-eyed, has creative imagination; his works are rich in varied elements; his memory for figures is marvellous; his lack of self-confidence prevents him from speaking in an informal and vivid way; his metaphors and script is instinctively beautiful; with his drawings he is able to express ideas in a naturalistic way; he is weak in exact relations; he is fond of biological tales, his own tales verify his sense for tale forms; his works reflect a sense for structures as well as a love for emotional motifs; he can illustrate well; he likes to experiment, he enjoys new discoveries, he is busy and searching in everything; he is ready to work together with others, he is insistent and has warm feelings, helpful". The description was done on Gyula Kandó, Junior of Egerfarmos, Sztregova, and Marcali. It seems to involve the whole course of life as well as the artistic career together with all its pitfalls. In one of the reviews of the later exhibitions, his work is referred to as a "culturally expressed, decorative but a bit tale-like piece of art" while others emphasize its "bizarre colouring". When he died, one of his friends, Endre Bálint giving the funeral address called him "one of the last spectre-knights" of Budapest. The career of the artist almost completely forgotten by now started in Italy: he was born in Savona, on the 17 th of January 1908, as the third son of Gyula Kandó, Senior, an engineer. The father, together with his brother, Kálmán Kandó, worked there on developing the so-called kandó-engine. They could return to Hungary only after the outbreak of World War I. Gyula Kandó did his art studies from 1928 to 1931 together with his later wife, Etelka (Ata) Görög, in Sándor Bortnyik's graphic school called Workshop founded in 1928 at 3 Nagymező Street in Budapest. Sándor Bortnyik, who belonged to the circle of the monthly titled Ma (Today), had got acquainted with the educational principles of Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922 and taught on the basis of similar principles in his own school as proved by his ideas worded in articles published in various scientific journals. In every field of human creation - he writes - based on the principles of "rationalism, functionalism and spiritual as well as material economy" the new forms have to emerge almost automatically from the interplay of material, function and structure. We cannot disregard the fact that the neo-conservatism of the 20's was trying to repress constructivism and avant-garde completely from the field of the so-called grand art so its results were absorbed mostly into the field of applied arts serving mass culture. Posters and advertisements as visual mass media - in earlier periods as well - were intended to have an alarming role in creating a Utopian, communistic society as well as in influencing the consumer customs of accelerating industrial societies. Agreeing with those working for developing modern contemporary art Bortnyik remarks that a poster can also be evaluated from the point of view of artistic idiom and its purpose is "to convey a thing in the shortest way, with the most simple devices to have a durable effect" contrary to the often epic and anecdotic character of the poster art practice of that time. According to Ernő Mihályfi, the Art of books and advertisements exhibition arranged in the Museum of Applied Arts in 1930 was an "amazing result" of the school, which had been existed for only a short time. Among others, Victor Vasarely and Kandó also exhibited their designs. His advertising graphics designs, whose reproductions were published in the monthlies Reklámélet (Advertising) and Magyar Grafika (Hungarian Graphics), with the arrangement of decorative elements simplified to the mere essence prove that he had understood the principles declared by Bortnyik and adopted them well. Applied graphic activity as a means for making his living keeps turning up during Kandó's career: he designed stage scenes, illustrations, posters and record jackets. It was probably for an official acknowledgement of what he had learnt under Bortnyik that he went to the Budapest Academy of Commerce and did a special course on advertisements and window-dressing in 1936. At the school the psychology and calculation of advertising as well as typography and window-dressing were taught. The open-mindedness he learnt in Bortnyik's Workshop as well as the practice of conscious form analyses got deeply absorbed into Kandó's way of thinking. The photos of his works, however, testify that doing art serving merely rational and
