Mazányi Judit szerk.: Vajda Lajos Emlékmúzeum, Szentendre / katalógus (PMMI, Szentendre, 2008)

Introduction

Introduction He was given merely 33 years of life and hardly more than a ten-year's creating period. However, during this relatively short time he was able to open revolutionarily new dimensions in visual thinking, in the Hungarian fine arts of the 1930s. His career was accompanied with existential misery and his works were received with incomprehension and silence - even a long time after his death. The sites of his spiritual maturation were: Serbia, Szentendre, the graphic school of the National Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association, the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Kassák's Work-Circle and Paris. He wanted to be a traditional and modern artist at the same time. Although what he meant by tradition was not the continuation of the results of academies or direct predecessors but the great cultures generated in ancient times, the folk culture and the art of Europe before the Renaissance with the Orthodox icons among them. He regarded them as carriers of universal values that are worth drawing on and reinterpreting for a 20th century artist against the reflection of his own age. According to that ^interpretation, he radically broke away from the picture ideal traditional in European culture as well as from the ways of representation. He tried to bring together the latest results of contemporary European art, of Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism and abstraction as well as those of modern film art. The suitable place that helped his ideas to develop was Szentendre - the town already famous for its painters, and involving various cultures: Serbian, German, Slovakian and Hungarian. From his letters of lyrical mood written to his wife, a large-scale program is suggested that he worked out together with his friend, painter Dezső Korniss on how to create an art for the benefit of people, establishing a style in the classical sense at the same time. It was obvious, however, that in the shadow of fascism and Stalinism there was no possibility for creating synthesis and style imagined as a collective movement. Around 1937, the artist was forced to say farewell to the idea of a constructed thus perceivable and tenantable world. Through the memorial visions of fossil finds of more and more ancient cultures, Vajda was trying to find the answers to the tormenting questions of the period until he eventually found in naked biological forms the adequate expression of primary instinctive reactions of a personality struggling within the grasp of the age. Vajda's oeuvre was finished and completed with fate and age cruelly overlapping each other. After the artist's death in 1943 then in 1947, his works were exhibited, and his contemporaries began to pay attention to him. The Stalinist turn of Hungarian history in 1949 with its tragic consequences hindered the acknowledgement process of the oeuvre. His works rested in his wife's drawer for bed linen for a long time. However, this drawer became famous among the younger artist generation. Many of them could get acquainted with the oeuvre of one of the most individual painters of the 20th century Hungarian art through taking out and having a look at the drawings from that particular drawer. The official socialist culture policy did not let the public approach Lajos Vajda's life-work until its softening period. The first important recognition was Vajda Lajos emlékkönyv (Memorial book of Lajos Vajda) compiled of several authors' writings and published in 1972. The real break-through was the retrospective exhibition of revealing force at the Hungarian National Gallery in 1978. In 1983 was published the one-time eye-witness, Stefánia Mándy's monography analysing the artist's spiritual situation and the development of his thinking, which has been considered as a basic work ever since. In 1979, the Hungarian State purchased a major part of the life-work and donated Ferenczy Museum 100 works in order to have them displayed in a memorial museum established in Szentendre. The museum was opened on 22nd December 1986. 15