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

Way to what cannot be named. Lajos Vajda's career

Way to what cannot be named Lajos Vajda's career Room 1 Our museum preserves but a few of Lajos Vajda's works marking the stages of his maturing to become an artist. Knowing the oeuvre, however, we can say that he had an outstanding sense of proportion and a good ability to represent perspective even at the early stages. Several dozens of his studies prove how hard he worked to improve his capacities. He was 16 years old when he painted the aquarelle titled Village Church (1), which could just as well have been the promising start of the career of a painter working in a traditional approach. His serious illness and the loss of his mother had left deep traces in the young artist and foreshadowed the tragic turns of the career. After the years of practice spent at the art school of OMIKE (National Hungarian Israelite Cultural Association) he was ad mitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in 1927. However, in 1929, conservative-minded teachers made the students - among them Lajos Vajda and Dezső Korniss - of such masters as István Csók or János Vaszary, who represented a more progressive approach, leave the Academy. Both young artists had attended the Academy when they got acquainted with the leading figure of Hungarian avant-garde, an internationally acknowledged constructivist artist, Lajos Kassák, who had returned from emigration in 1926. They took part in the comprehensive activity of Munka (Work) Circle, which had been organised by Kassák. The young artists expelled from the Academy had exhibited their works together in 1930, under the name of New Progressive Artists then most of them went abroad. While the majority of Hungarian artists considered plein air evolving at the Nagybánya artists' colony as a modern tradition, the youth mentioned above eagerly watched the latest developments of international art. The charcoal drawing titled View from the Church Hill (1929) (6) depicting the Main Square of Szentendre at night marks the change of emphasis with the young academy student. The picture constructed from dark, soft yet energetic patches and dynamically flashing white surfaces recalls the graphic solutions of activism. In some of his works, constructivism appears with consistent purity: Vajda constructed a vigorous balance with fine asymmetries from circles, squares, regular geometric forms and block letters. In the autumn of 1930, Vajda went to the French capital and spent there three and a half years. At this time, highlighted among other important art centres, Paris was the art capital of the world. In the inextricable network of modern and avant-garde artistic efforts flourishing beside one another, surrealism widening into a movement was the latest development. The almost negligible support the young artist received from his father was enough for nothing. He lived in misery and did odd jobs like painting tin soldiers. In the mean time, he buried himself in the libraries and, besides receiving the results of new artistic endeavours with an impartial openness, he regularly visited the collections of museums displaying the relics of great cultures outside Europe. Parallel with it, he was so attracted by French and Russian avant-garde film art that he began to question the traditional idea of the autonomous picture. It was also in Paris that he made friends with Lajos Szabó, philosopher, who had been searching for the possibility of reconciling intellectual traditions with pulsating modern life, and Vajda's 17