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

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

Room 3 The rapid dissolution of the traditional world concept, which used to denote the exact place of an individual - that had already begun in the 19th century -, the information flow owing to the sudden increase of knowledge, the great economic crisis of the thirties accompanied with serious social and political tensions, the depressing memories of a passed war and the threatening shadow of a forthcoming one: were all problems that challenged the people of the period - among them the artists - to offer an authentic and working solution, which was almost impossible to find. Vajda's whole oeuvre can be regarded as a grandiose experiment to discover adequate answers in both the form and the substance. "Life is hurrying, the age is hurrying, people are hurrying and so are we, towards the end or infinity. Time is inconceivable so we cannot feel it. We are just aware of its being. I often experience that I have wasted time and I have not done anything but it is because human soul is not conditioned to adapt his/her activities according to outer circumstances." - writes Vajda rejecting the external pulsation of modern age. Although he sensitively responded to the important moments of his own age, which is reflected in the changes of the life-work as well, he would not take over that rapid rhythm. It is not accidental that you cannot see anything from the requisites of urban life in his pictures - except in the montages. As his career was advancing, he was more and more engaged in the substance existing outside time than the phenomenon generated in time. Consequently, he got on deeper and deeper along the path of tradition during the subsequent stages of his career. For the same reason, he may have chosen Szentendre, the living-place of his family, the town on the Danubebank famous for its artists' colony, as the substance of his inspiration. From 1935 on, together with Dezső Korniss, his fellow at the academy, he began to discover the spiritual aspect of the multicultural town and its surroundings. "Me and Korniss often browse about in the winding streets of the town in the evening, after sunset, when everything is quiet and calm, the houses seem to huddle together, everything appears in a silhouette-like way, and the sky is emerald sprinkled with small diamonds. As we are strolling in the narrow alleys, an invisible source of light casts mystical shadows on the opposite wall, and we are astonished from amazement, and feel what can be expressed only visually. The atmosphere is like in a tale where there are wonders at every step and where anything may happen" - he writes impressively in one of his letters. Both of them had been influenced by the essay "Hungarian art" written by Lajos Fülep, which examines the potential interrelation of universal and national art endeavours. Bartók and Kodály's music based on collecting folk songs also impressed them. That was the reason why they went on motif collecting tours in Szentendre a well as in the surrounding settlements. Though hardly anything remained of Korniss' collection, both of them seem to have been interested in almost every element of traditional way of life. Their purpose - worded in one of Vajda's letter and known in art history as the Szentendre program - was to create a style from constructive-surrealistic themes. Parallel with it, they would have liked to establish a modern CentralEastern European art extending to a movement that could bring about a synthesis drawing on folk art and old traditional cultures between eastern and western avant-garde, or the two cultural spheres. Village houses, various architectural details, simple, shabby carts, crumbling, roadside crosses and old gravestone inscriptions appeared in Vajda's drawings. Church, Trees, Dotted Forms (21) of 1934 or Yellow House (28) of 1935 merely shows the view of the townscape. However, he had more and more drawings with elements torn out of their original context and represented from different points of view. These elements dissolving into one another are constructed according to the principles of montage. Meanwhile, the objects lose their original meanings and their associative field extends. Vajda often inserted the very same motif into a new connection, which resulted in new layers of meaning from the point of view of form and substance 20