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

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

time that they were received with incomprehension even in the most progressive circles. Thus, his pictures were not exhibited; he could not get to the public. Very few of those close to him, artist friends and contemporaries of the same age or younger than him were able to feel the real content of his endeavours. One of them was Endre Bálint, who wrote about his friend's art in 1938: "His painterly world is an abstract one that can hardly be determined. This world rejects coldly and mercilessly anything that is mild, indefinite or optimistic. For Vajda, nature does not mean idyllic moods like for many of his contemporaries". His trust in an idea of social-size community was deteriorated by two cruel variations of its retrogression: fascism and Stalinism. The first one threatened his life directly when after the Anschluss, parallel with the outbreak of World War II the Jew Acts were codified. The second one ruined his ideas. Vegetating in beggarly lodgings destroyed his health. Sometimes he did phase drawings to cartoons to earn a living. Thus his creative loneliness was combined with a threatened human existence. At that time, he started his way alone to find an explanation to his tormenting doubts in the depths of soul and, as a consequence, he got closest to positive surrealism. Even in that period of his, he insisted on the chance of finding a valid answer. This is what saved his art from the eventualities of mere self-expression falling into a whirl. The head breaking into splinters in Abstract Self-portrait (62) reflects the aggressive gestures of a soul in despair and opens a way towards his masked self-portraits, where he recalls his impressions on ancient cultures he collected in Paris and - according to his book of readings - widened with further information. In his pastel titled Brown Grated Mask (74), the brutal head might just as well be the presentation of a threatening object or the distorted inner face of a threatened man. The meek strangeness of Rainbow Mask (80) indicates the artist's search for the eras of human culture when the ruins of the errors of civilisation did not cover the transcendent substance he desired. The mask becomes the strange map of a distant individual and the signs on it suggest an inextricable secret message. The pastel titled Bounded (76) has a bird-headed, shapeless-handed figure with his body built up of lacks and spasms. The mood of this figure was worded by the poet, Attila József, some years before: "I am bound up to torments with hard ropes, I am entwined on all sides, and I cannot find the knot I would undo with a pull." Beside the masks, strange landscapes were created. Sometimes - for example in the picture titled House, Fish, Moon (91) - the artist seems to be just a medium of the man of prehistoric times, who fixes important experiences in signs inextricable for us and often confused: small ladders, never-heard-of celestial bodies, enumerated dots, zigzag motifs, cuts, bundle of lines and rags of patches. In Huge Landscape Mask (75), the prehistoric bare landscape is rather represented as a vision just as in the picture Frog Monster (89), where the lying figure seems to represent the body of a reptile killed in the Palaeozoic era. The unusual, never-existing, mostly organic shapes turning up in these pictures try to take up - even if for a peep of time for the perception - the form of existing elements. It is similar to the phenomenon when pictures of dreams at dawn become sharp then without their meaning apperceived they fall into oblivion leaving back embarrassing moods. In the works made in Indian ink in 1939, the shapes constructed of minutely thick fibre-bundles according to the laws of nature and not that of culture step over the border of non-figurativeness and anticipate the last charcoal-drawing series of the oeuvre, which is outstanding from the point of view of both Hungarian and European art. In 1940, he made charcoal drawings inspired by primary biological forms: decaying roots, mushrooms and drying branches. They embodied his idea conceptualised earlier: the whole universe is interrelated and there is no exception to this rule. Elsewhere, he remarks: "... what inexplorable "laws" does accident have." The outside world becoming increasingly inestimable, a subject becomes defenceless against irrationality. In the pictures in charcoal, an invisible magnetic field accumulating large energies forces into form the dark fibres that begin to run wild as a threatening protophyta with aggressive, murderous extensions. The knotty, irregular shapes arousing anguish show the struggle of changing, transient elements with the parts of the empty surfaces suggesting infinity. Though the compositions appear as a whole world in themselves, the 22