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

of photography, and which is also a defining feature of some of Egry's paintings, where light and atmosphere is transformed as soon as the painter fills it with the intent to depict the phenomenon in its fullness. The beams and pillars of light, the interpenetrating light rays create a lyrical atmosphere, while becoming the underlying structural determinants of the composition. The picture planes layer upon one another in increasingly complex and crystalline fashion. These planes, joined in an elegant order, are the quintessential elements of a given landscape. The pictorial structure is defined by the arcs of the shorelines, the mountains of the far shore bordering the water, and the all-important roads that occasionally curve up and away, but mostly run parallel the horizontal plane of the composition. Considering the entire oeuvre, the oftentimes determining trends in iconography, as it were, lose their importance in Egry's paintings. It may be that a painting has a road crossing diametrically from left to right, even though the main motif, the picture's chief focus, is the figure of the painter who marches through the landscape with heaps of paper under his arm, as in Painter in Sunlight, from around 1930 (Plate 44) - and the emphasis is again the same as in most of his Balaton landscapes containing figures: the harmony and unity that, even in depicting the individual figure, ties it in and makes it one with the landscape. This same space, the Balaton as the visionary setting of sacred ritual, serves the painter well in his Biblical scenes, such as in Saint John the Baptist (Plate 37) and Saint Christopher of the Balaton (Plate 26). In the latter composition, flanked by pillars of light, St. Christopher carries the Babe on his shoulders, while being bent by the burdens of poverty, human existence, and the cosmos itself. This same sacred Balaton landscape is where Egry's peasants work the soil, where his fishermen live on its waters and his herdsmen cool their beasts wading in the lake. His figures, formed of burnt Sienna reds and browns all originate in this soil and water and are of a piece, as is the painter himself depicted in the sunlit landscape wearing a hat (Plate 32). Egry's self-portraits from the 1920's and '30's show man becoming one with the landscape. Earlier, these pictorial "diary entries" had faithfully followed the self-discovery of the young man and his development into a mature man. The wrinkles, originating in childhood, multiplied in the painter's visage. The inescapability of solitude and despair led to such interpretative self-portraits as the Touter of 1929 (Plate 34). When the painter, standing by his easel in the harbor, looks the viewer in the eye, he is still observing himself When he stands next to his easel surrounded by the hills, looking at the picture or the view, and paints himself as part of the landscape, his experience is authentic and true; "the scene in front of him continues behind his back". Egry always painted only what he has experienced and lived through. This accounts for the anguish, the hopelessness, the lack of a way out in the painter's tormented eyes; this is why he depicts himself helpless, behind bars (Plate 65). His 1940 Self-Portrait (Plate 60) with its frightened, tormented features speaks of a man with eyes fixed on the opposite shore. It is customary to pay homage to Egry, who found his main motif and himself by the shores of Lake Balaton, as a great solitary in Hungarian art, as a painter of light. His highest moments of transcendence result from the painterly tools he acquired in the 1920's: oil and pastel, the translucence of thin layers of oil paint and the airiness of velvety, soft smears of pastel and the empty white spots that had been almost exclusively the domain of Oriental masters of landscape art. His identification with nature, his feel for the pantheistic unity of man and nature, the hymn-like flow and lyricism of his paintings make Egry the greatest Hungarian painter of light. Just like some "shaman of a sun-worshipping tribe", his mythic worship of the sun succeeds in painting that heavenly body as a sphere of light whose rays create pictorial structure, emanate bundles of light related to the solar symbolism of the Expressionists - dematerialized radiating beams of light that acquire a transcendent meaning. Egry's ars poetica authenticates his greatness as an artist and as a human being: "In order to create art we must make the visible known, the known experienced, the experienced sublime." Even in painting the simplest, most everyday subjects, Egry provides a transcendent experience that makes encountering his art an act of celebration. From his memoirs and diary entries we know that he, too, was possessed by a rapt devotion upon viewing masterworks at a museum. In one place he wrote: "Art is the celebration of the soul. I clad my soul in Sunday best when I take up the brush. My holiday clothes are light and clean and bright. When I don them they place me in magnificent touch with eternal life, the one and only. And when you are in touch with life, with Life itself, you cannot help but rejoice in ecstasy for being given the miracle of life, for being able to see the morning mist over the lake, for seeing spring and autumn. And to prove how vast and infinite is the goodness of life - you may even glimpse a rainbow."