Gopcsa Katalin (szerk.): Egry (Budapest, 2005)

Egry confessed that he loved to live in Badacsony, to look out through his window and see the huge body of water, to witness the phenomena of the changing seasons and different times of the day, "for in the city the seasons are defined by the artificial limits of the calendar. In the country everything is more immediate, and so are the effects of nature." In saying this he was thinking of such "everyday miracles" as rainfall, storms, rainbows. When we become aware of the presence of the simplest things in the world, the poet Pilinszky tells us, we come to realize that we have become mindful of the most important point, "the miracle where no cheating is possible, and which is little by little becoming relegated exclusively to the eyes and minds of children, madmen, saints, and the feebleminded." But we also know that, as the saying goes, "if you are capable of wonder, wonders open up around you". Among the more than three hundred Egry sketches at the Balaton Museum in Keszthely there are numerous studies of rainbows, several of which were executed as large-scale paintings from the mid-1920's on through 1940. They all exhibit a joyful experience that Egry wished to convey as the gift of life. The gradual discovery, the awakening wonder of the Balaton landscape is also the history of a maturing vision, both outward and inward, of spiritual growth, of self-observation and knowledge. Egry was aware of these transformations and referred to them several times: "I discovered my true self in the atmosphere of my native soil"... "I have learned the language of nature as understood by her fanatical admirers ... in order to arrive at my true being". Examining the great stylistic changes of the 1920's, appreciative commentators of Egry's art track the dramatic formulation of the simultaneous presence of light and darkness in his compositions. In his 1921 painting Burning Peat (Plate 23) the sky is a sea of flames. These flames set the landscape aglow with a uniformity that deprives it of any and all materiality. We see the same compositional scheme based on rhythmic sinuous lines in Misty Mirage Lights and Ploughing with Four Oxen (Plate 30). But we also discover a new, liberated note in the shape of the plowman working with "whistling merriment", which is akin to the delicate humor of the Swineherd (Plate 67) of 1934 that evokes a poem by Attila József on a similar theme. The fairy-tale figure of this swineherd is closely related to the folk-art-like quality of the figures in Christmas Carolers (Plate 47). On this painting, the children with their long fake beards and paper mache crèche waiting solemnly to perform the Christmas Eve Nativity play next to the puritanical, impoverished yet still dignified table set with bread and wine the artist has managed to depict an intimate holiday spirit that, because of its simplicity, conceals his skill while conveying the moral and philosophical power underlying it. Another painting, In the Mountains of Taormina (Plate 38), portrays a man with a donkey. In the painting glimmering in golden light, which Egry painted in Italy, the man "carries the Sun on his head like a new, peasant Apollo behind whom the mountains and woods are decomposed and reassembled by the light". This man could be the twin brother of the man on another Egry painting, whistling as he meanders with his donkey among the spherical trees on a Badacsony hillside (Plate 48). Egry's human figures and landscapes, painted in Italy, are akin to and at one with those painted on the Balaton, and this unity pervades the entire oeuvre. We concur with Máriusz Rabinovszky who wrote in 1934 that "Egry's Italian journey (1930) did not bring about a change in his art, nor could it have, for in his art the actual motif is not an end, but only the means." When discussing the Balaton as the painter's main motif, Júlia Szabó brings up Bartók as an analogy when she points out that the lake had become the artist's refuge, the mainspring of his inspiration, the "pure source" of which Bartók spoke in relationship to folk music. Egry's own confession in connection with others of his paintings also helps to understand what fascinated him. "I am interested in space and infinity. Take for instance the figure of a woman shouting into the distance. This shout that vanishes into the endless distances interests me. Everyone paints light as dissolving. I am excited by light itself, by the atmosphere, which is architectonic. In my pictures the light, the haze take form, just like the figure itself, and fill the spaces." In this instance the figure that fills the picture is that of a woman standing at the meeting of water and land, around whom every detail loses its individual objective reality, transformed in the context of endless space. The woman's shout symbolizes the human urge to create a link to the cosmos. (Plate 54). The given landscape, the view, is always the starting point in Egry's Balaton landscapes. The defining factors are the lake's atmospheric conditions, the reflections of air, vapor, water; the incident light as painterly inspiration - in short, a backlit effect, which had been a defining factor in the history